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Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 19 (2005)

Literatuur Zonder Leeftijd. Jaargang 19

(2005)– [tijdschrift] Literatuur zonder leeftijd–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

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Translating Culture
Children's literature in translation
Riitta Oittinen

De Finse Riita Oittinen is docent aan de universiteit van Tampere en van Helsinki. Zij houdt zich bezig met onderzoek naar het vertalen van kinderboeken, waarover zij, ook in andere talen, publiceerde. In onderstaande bijdrage beschrijft zij de culturele invloeden op vertalingen.

Introduction

Translating is a process, an act carried out by a translator in a certain situation. A translation is a new rewritten text in a new culture. In my article, I will take a look at this situation from the viewpoint of culture and translating for children. Culture is one part of the translator's situation, which includes not just the text told in words and illustrations but the whole situation of interpreting texts. Even the translator's child-image is influenced by her or his cultural background.

Culture could also be seen from a different perspective. Children's literature has a dual audience: children and adults. Thus children's literature is also part of children's culture, which has always reflected all of society, adult images of childhood, the way children themselves experience childhood and the way adults remember it.1. Yet I am not going to explore this any further but I rather deal with translation as cross-cultural communication. I'll concentrate on what happens when texts coming from different languages and cultures are translated and what kinds of strategies translators adopt when translating culturally specific texts.2.

From Dialogue to Dialogue

Translators always act in a situation, and in doing so, they enter into dialogic relationships involving readers, authors, illustrators, translators, and publishers. Situations vary. A translation is a rewritten text in another time, another place, another language, another country - in another culture.

Every word is born in a dialogue. In this situation, a word, a discussion, a language, a culture is related with another word, another discussion, another language, another culture. As the Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin points out, dialogue takes place between persons, but it may also take place between persons and things, with a human being involved: there is a human being reading the words and seeing the illustrations, and there is a human being who has created them.3.

In other words, translators never translate words in isolation but whole situations. They bring to the translation their cultural heritage, their reading experience, and in the case of children's books, their own child image. As Bakhtin says, ‘at any given time, in any given place, there will be a set of conditions - social, historical, meteorological, physiological - that will ensure that a word uttered in that place and at that time will have a meaning different than it would have under any other conditions.’4. If we change any detail in the situation - such as culture - the whole situation of understanding becomes new.

From Culture to Culture

Translating is understanding entities: translators have certain interpretations of the original texts they are translating, which forms the basis for their translations. Every detail in a translation needs to be looked at against the background of the total interpretation of the story.

Translating for a certain age-group or a certain culture also involves audience design.5. In other words, translators design their texts according to the target-language audiences and their expectations. The Finnish Donald Duck with its special, humoristic ‘Duck style’ is a good example of this. As the chief editor of the magazine Jukka Heiskanen points out, the purpose of the translation is not to bring forth the original text's style and contents as such but rather to concentrate on the Finnish audience's expectations, likes and dislikes.6. In other words, the style is constantly being fine-tuned according to the feedback received from the targetgroup, the 7-14-year-old readers. The audience design and the easy-flowing, funny language with metonymy and alliteration has been highly praised by Finnish teachers, but the translated texts in words have little in common with the original wording, even thought the pictures remain the same. The localized stories include Finnish phenomena such as names of Finnish celebrities and references to Finnish political life. This kind of translating is certainly very culture-specific.

Cultural differences are always a central problem in translation, even at the level of writing: text processing varies from culture to culture, and using letters, fonts, and sizes, may prove problematic. For example, unlike in many European languages, capital letters are not used in the Arabic, where capital letters are replaced by, e.g., bolding and italics. There are also differences between whole systems of writing, and the direction of reading the verbal and the visual may change from language to language. In the Islamic world, for example, the right hand is sacred and used for eating and greeting people. As the Finnish Islam expert Jaakko Hämeen-Anttila points out, it is very important to use the right hand in the Arabic eating tradition; using the left hand would be a shocking breach of good form.7. This may cause great problems with texts in translation, especially with illustrated works. The Jordanian translation scholar Jehan Zitawi has studied translations of Donald Duck from English into the Arabic and has found several cases where reversing the pictures - due to the change in the writing-reading direction - has proved problematic: after reversing, the characters may sometimes eat using their left, profane hands. In these cases the pictures have often been altered or replaced altogether.8.

Moreover, illustrations cause problems, as they often give detailed information by placing stories in specific countries and cultural surroundings. As picture books are usually co-prints (translations into different languages are printed by the same printer at the same time to reduce costs) and almost nothing visual can be altered, translators need to pay attention to the visual aspect and design their texts so that they conform to the visual information of the books to be translated. In other words, translators need to domesticate their texts according to the visual, too.

Domesticating and Foreignising

Domestication and foreignisation are translation strategies adopted during the translation process. Foreignisation refers to a strategy whereby some significant trace of the original ‘foreign’ text is retained. Domestication, on the other hand, assimilates a text to target cultural and linguistic values.9. In other words, through domestication texts are taken closer to target-language readers; through foreignisation it is the other way around.

Anything can be domesticated: names and the setting can be localized; genres, historical events, cultural or religious rites or beliefs can be adapted for future readers of texts. We domesticate for children, for minority cultures; in Fin-

land we domesticate for Finns, in the United States for American citizens. Texts may also be domesticated because of political pressures, censorship, and differing moral values or child images. Different purposes of texts, different settings, different audiences, and different times are all dimensions of domestication: what is domesticated, how and why depends on the situation.

The American scholar Lawrence Venuti finds several reasons why foreignising is preferable to domestication. For him, domesticated translations ‘conform to dominant cultural values’, whereas foreignisation ‘challenges the dominant aesthetics’. Foreignised translations also ‘signal the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text’ and seek ‘to restrain the ethnocentric violence of translation’. From this Venuti infers that foreignness as such is something desirable, and that domestic values, linguistic codes, and aesthetics should be rejected.10.

The Swedish scholar Göte Klingberg divides the concept adaptation (cf. domestication) further, into subcategories such as deletion, addition, explanation, simplification, or localization, where the whole text is transferred into a country, language or epoch more familiar to the target-language reader. Klingberg also describes ‘anti-localizing’ (cf. foreignising) as a means of retaining all the information in the original - like names, years, places - as it is. Thus the translator emphasizes the fact that the story is really situated in a foreign culture, letting the child readers learn new things about new cultures. In addition, Klingberg deals with cultural context adaptation, where things (e.g., personal and geographical names and measurements) are explained to the reading and listening children, who, due to their lack of experience, may not understand the foreign or otherwise strange information found in books.11.

Within children's literature, domesticating and foreignising are delicate issues. Several scholars have taken a stand against domesticating, as they feel it denatures and pedagogizes children's literature.12. Yet translating for children is also a question about pedagogics and translations have a great impact on how children see foreign cultures.13.

Jamela, Annie, and Alice

As a translator I have often pondered the problem of domesticating or foreignising culture. I faced this problem, while translating Niki Daly's books about the little zulu girl Jamela: Jamela's Dress and What's Cooking, Jamela? The stories, situated in a small village in South Africa, come from several cultures and langu-

ages: the characters are native South Africans even though they all speak English. The diversity of cultures naturally causes problems to translators, and I found it very important to tell the story in such a way that it would be easily adopted by Finnish children. To make it easier for the target-langue readers to identify with the girl and the story, I needed to domesticate a little bit. At some points, I added a word, a short explanation, of things possibly strange to Finnish readers.

For example, while translating Jamela's dress, the most difficult problem was to produce a functional translation of a little song game in the book. It was a song about a teapot and pouring out tea into a cup. I had to keep to the basic idea of the game, as the illustration showed how Jamela and her mother played the game and acted as if they were pouring tea:

‘Let's do teapots, mama!’ cried Jamela. So Jamela taught Mama to do a little song about a teapot with a spout. They dipped and tipped and the tea poured out.

To create a believable translation, I had to find a song not just to conform to the illustration but to be familiar to children in both South Africa and Finland. In the end, I found the song ‘Lou, Lou, skip to my Lou!’ - in Finnish ‘Aamulla herätys, sängystä pois’ - well-known to children in Finland and in many English-speaking countries. In this way my text functions in both of the cultural contexts. While translating the second Jamela book, What's Cooking, Jamela?, I found it very important to try to include as much of the foreign information as possible. For example, there were many ngugi and xhosa phrases, such as ‘Hamba!’ (go away) and ‘Haai!’ (expressing astonishment).14. Like in the original book, there was a list of the foreign words with explanations toward the end of my translation. The foreign words were not explained, neither in the original nor in the translation, but it was up to the reader to figure out their meaning, on the basis of the context. Doing this I let my reader feel that the story was situated in a foreign, African country. In other words, I foreignised my text.

Cultural differences are also apparent in the covers of translated books. When the Finnish picture book author Kristiina Louhi's Aino series was published in English by Methuen, many verbal and visual details were domesticated due to cultural differences between Finland and England. The Aino stories depict the everyday life of little Aino and her baby brother. In the verbal text, most of

the references to Finnish everyday life were diluted and the Finnish feel of the story was wiped out. For example, the book cover of the original Aino ja pakkasen poika shows a little boy running stark naked (only wearing his tiny cap) in the snow. In the English-language version, Annie and the New Baby, the cover shows a boy fully clothed and wearing a pair of trousers. The editors of the translation had asked Louhi to draw a new cover, because the Finnish cover was considered indecent.

The same phenomenon can be found in many of the Arabic translations of Donald Duck. For example, there are strips where beautiful young women are sun-bathing while Donald is jumping into a swimming-pool. In many of the Arabic versions, young ladies' legs and arms are covered with black ink. In the same vein, pig police officers (pigs are considered unclean animals in the Arabic religion) have lost their nostrils to look less like pigs. This is both a cultural and moral issue: in different cultures and religions parents have different child images, different views about what is appropriate and proper for children. Yet censoring starts as soon as books are considered to be translated. Regularly, books from far-away places containing many culture-specific details are not chosen for translation.

Changes in time also have an influence on how translators deal with culturally specific information. This is clearly shown in the four different Finnish translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.15. In 1995, when Finland became a member of the European Union, Alice Martin's ‘Alice’ translation was published. Since the 1980s and 1990s, the Anglo-Saxon orientation has been very strong in Finland. Today, watching television, we do not consider ‘the British’ as very foreign any more and today we seem to tolerate ‘otherness’ better than before. Again this is shown in the translations published: for instance, unlike in the previous translations, Alice was now allowed to keep her original English name.

While the earlier translators had rewritten the story for Finnish child readers, Martin kept to the otherness of culture, time, and place. The 1995 version is much closer to British culture and history. One example of this is the scene in which Big Alice has just cried a pool of tears and Small Alice has changed her size again after tasting something. The poor girl tumbles into a pool that she has cried herself:

As she said these words her foot slipped, and in another moment, splash! she was up to her chin in salt-water. Her first idea was that she had somehow fallen into the sea, ‘and in that case I can go back by railway’, she said to herself. (Alice had been to the seaside once in her life, and had come to the general conclusion that wherever you go to on the English coast, you find a number of bathing-machines in the sea, some children digging in the sand with wooden spades, then a row of lodging-houses, and behind them a railway station.) However, she soon made out that the sea was in the pool of tears which she had wept when she was nine feet high.16.

The bold section depicts British seaside life in the 19th century with quaint old things like bathing machines and wooden spades. The section is deleted from the first two Finnish translations of ‘Alice’ from 1906 and 1972, while all the details are diligently included in the two later translations from 1995 and 2000. Nowadays translators can rely more on what the audience know about the source culture.

Closeness of Cultures

Mauri (and Tarja) Kunnas's The Canine Kalevala, originally Koirien Kalevala, is a good example of intertextuality and cultural problems in translation. The book is both verbally and visually based on the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, and the pictures, paintings and illustrations by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, a notable artist representing Finnish National Romanticism and Symbolism.

Mauri Kunnas is one of the best known and most productive picture book creators in Finland. His books, comics, and animated films have been translated into 16 languages. Kunnas tells stories about dogs, elves, Father Christmas or Santa Claus, the space, the wild west, vampires and ghosts as well as the European epic tradition, such as King Arthur and his knights.17.

Kunnas's style is colourful and rich in detail, and he combines wild imagination and detailed realism. His books are full of action, humour, but also poetic depictions of nature. While his creatures - mainly dogs - are fantastic, many of his stories are situated in the very realistic Finnish countryside from the 19th century. Kunnas has closely examined old Finnish traditions, landscapes, tools, and household utensils, which all make his books believable despite their fantastic nature. For example, on one page-opening, Aino the fair maiden is gather-

ing birch twigs for the sauna. In other words, she makes a vihta, a bath whisk, used in the Finnish sauna. It is considered a healthy and nice experience to whisk oneself in the hot and moist air of the sauna. Yet neither the verbal nor the visual narration tells what Aino is going to do with the vihta. To understand the scene, previous knowledge of the tradition would be required.

In the following I'll take a closer look at Kunnas's picture book Koirien Kalevala, The Canine Kalevala, which was published in 1992. The book has been translated into English and Swedish. Both the English translation The Canine Kalevala by Tim Steffa and the Swedish version Hundarnas Kalevala by Lars Huldén were published in 1994. This is extraordinary, as the two translations were co-printed in Finland.

The Canine Kalevala, Koirien Kalevala, is rich in intertextuality. First of all, the stories in the book are based on other stories, those of the Finnish epic the Kalevala. Secondly, the book includes several ‘canine’ humoristic versions, visual retellings, of the Kalevala paintings by the beloved Finnish artist Akseli Gallen-Kallela. In The Canine Kalevala, the heroes are dogs; the enemies are wolves, and the anti-hero, Lemminkäinen, is a cat that fails in anything he tries to do. The introduction of The Canine Kalevala is cited below:

Long, long ago, when the world was still young, there dwelt in the faroff land of Kalevala a tribe of wild and woolly dogs. Their neighbor in the gloomy North was a pack of mean and wicked wolves. Between them lived a small but tough clan of cats.
The dogs and the wolves vied for sovereignty of the forests, and this often led to some pretty fierce squabbles. But for the most part, peace reigned.
In those days there was a good deal of magic in the world; and each tribe has its great wizards and shamans who were familiar with spells and incantations. (English version by Steffa)

After the introduction, the story begins with the second poem of the Kalevala, which depicts the creation of the world. From there on, the book closely follows the stories of the Kalevala. Of course, a great deal has been left out, but the main elements and themes are there. What is significantly different between the original Kalevala and Kunnas's retelling is the tone of the stories: the poetic and often tragic atmosphere of the original has been replaced by humour, laughter, and irony.

As to the relationship of the verbal and the visual - while the book contains a lot of verbal text, the storytelling mainly relies on the visual information. On

the one hand, the pictures give more depth to the stories told; on the other hand, the pictures also give the settings to the stories and place them in their historical context. There is both congruency and deviation. Through deviation, the illustrator often creates humour, even irony. For example, the time of the story in words often contradicts with that shown in the pictures: while the story is visually placed in the 19th century, the words may contain very modern phrases and details. It is also the other way around: the pictures may include modern objects that certainly were not found in the 19th-century Finnish countryside. For example, in a scene where the main hero Väinämöinen goes swimming, he leaves his false teeth lying on a stone. The detail also adds to the humour of the book and underlines the great age difference between the two, Väinämöinen and the young maiden Aino. In the same vein, Kunnas also mixes different styles of writing, such as the often solemn language of the Kalevala and the language of the everyday.

Humour is also created by changing the point of view. Yet the visual jokes function only if the reader recognizes the original paintings behind the canine versions. This is the case with a picture, where the Smith Seppo Ilmarinen plows the field of vipers. In the Gallén-Kallela's original, the vipers are mean and the reader feels strongly for the great brave hero, Seppo Ilmarinen. In Kunnas's canine version, the setting is turned upside down: the reader feels sympathy for the poor vipers, who suffer and are in great pain.

As to translating The Canine Kalevala, the problems caused by intertextuality and culturally specific details are many and hard to solve. First of all, the translator needs to consider carefully, how well the target-language readers are able to deal with the culturally specific information: how well they know the original stories of The Kalevala and to what extent they are able to recognize the original paintings behind Kunnas's canine versions.

The audiences of the two translations are in a very different position. The Swedish-language readers - the Swedes living in Sweden and especially the Swedish-speaking minority living in Finland - know the stories and illustrations quite well. Yet the average English-language readers do not know the original stories, and nor can they recognize the original illustrations. The culturally and geographically different situation caused the translators to use different strategies. While the translator of the English version needed to expand and explain and domesticate, the Swedish-language translator was able to trust that his audience will recognize the verbal and the visual hints.

For example, old Finnish vocabulary has caused great problems for the English translator. In the following example the anti-hero Lemminkäinen tries to ski:

Hiiden hirveä oli moni urhea uros yrittänyt turhaan pyydystää. Sitä ei kukaan saanut kiinni. Nyt oli Ahti Lemminkäisen vuoro yrittää. Hän otti suksensa, pitkän lylyn ja lyhyen kalhun, ja lähti hiihtämään. (Finnish original by Kunnas)
(In English: Many a valiant hero had sought to capture the elk of Hiisi, but to no avail. Now it was Ahti Lemminkäinen's turn to try. Taking up his skis, the long lyly and the short kalhu, away he went.)
Hiisis älg hade mången tapper hjälte förgäves försökt fånga. Ingen hade lyckats. Nu var det Ahti Lemminkäinens tur att försöka. Han tog sina skidor, den korta och den längre, och åkte i väg på dem. (Swedish version by Huldén)
(In English: Many a valiant hero had sought to capture the elk of Hiisi, but to no avail. Now it was Ahti Lemminkäinen's turn to try. Taking up his skis, the short one and the long one, away he went.)
Many a valiant hero had sought to capture the elk of Hiisi, but to no avail. Now it was Ahti Lemminkäinen's turn to try. Taking up his skiing gear, away he went. (English version by Steffa)

Even though the words referring to old-fashioned skis - the long lyly and the short kalhu - are not well known to Finnish average readers either, the Finnish reader will recognize the words. While the Swedish translator mentions the length of the skis, which helps the reader to understand the situation, the English translator has left out both the names and the description of the skis. In other words, the English translator relies heavily on the picture, which shows the difference of the skis. Yet, without any reference to the length of the skis, the English-language reader may just think that the skis are funny because the character, the cat Lemminkäinen, is funny: a funny character may have a funny way of skiing, too. However, at this point, the author-illustrator gives detailed folkloristic information about old Finnish traditions, which are all wiped out from the English translation. On the other hand, the book is intended for readers of all ages, children and adults. While the adult enjoys the verbal and the visual intertextuality, the child enjoys listening to the stories and looking at the colourful, humorous pictures.

While the Swedish translator manages to preserve the intertextuality of the story, the English translator has lost the text's intertextuality almost completely. Due to the geographical and cultural closeness to Finland, the Swedish version is quite close to the original. However, the English version relies heavily on the

illustrations, as many things can only be found in the illustrations or they are explained on the basis of the visual.

Conclusion

As a whole, my research clearly suggests that translator's work always involves pondering the problems of domestication and foreignisation. Translation is not only about words but about different situations, different people, and different cultures. Every culture is born in a dialogue.

My research also shows that a translator of illustrated texts who is situated far away culturally and/or geographically and translates accordingly tends to rely more on pictures than a translator who is closer. In this case, the illustrations in the book are vehicles of domestication and foreignisation. Illustrations may domesticate through giving explanation to some culturally specific details; illustrations may also foreignise or contain details that the reader finds strange or impossible to understand. The English version certainly makes the target-language reader stop and wonder at many culturally alien items, such as those concerning the sauna, winter, and cross-country skiing.

Sources

Bakhtin, Mikhail, The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (orig. Voprosy literatury i estetiki 1975). 1981; rpt. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Ed. Holquist. Austin, University of Texas Press, 1990.
Hatim, Basil, Ian Mason, The Translator as Communicator. London and New York, Routledge, 1997.
Hunt, Peter, Children's Literature. The Development of Criticism. 1989; rpt. London, Routledge, 1990, ed.
Hämeen-Anttila, Jaakko, Kuka murhasi Kyttyräselän? Tarinoita tuhannesta ja yhdestä yöstä. Finnish trans. and ed. Hämeen-Anttila. Helsinki, Basam Books, 2001.
Kaindl, Klaus, ‘Warum sind alle Japaner Linkshänder? Zum Transfer von Bildern in der Übersetzung von Comics’. In: TextConText 13 (1997), 1, p. 1-24.
Klingberg, Göte, Children's Fiction in the Hands of the Translators. Studia psychologica et paedagogica. Series altera LXXXII. Lund, Bloms Boktryckeri Ab, 1987.
Klingberg, Göte, Mary Ørvig, and Stuart Amor (eds.), Children's Books in Translation. The Situation and the Problems. Stockholm, Almqvist & Wiksell International 1978.
Meek, Margaret, ‘What Counts as Evidence in Theories of Children's Literature?’ See Hunt (ed.) Children's Literature. The Development of Criticism, (1990), p. 166-182.
Oittinen, Riitta, Kuvakirja kääntäjän kädessä (Translating Picture Books). Helsinki, Lasten Keskus, 2004.
Oittinen, Riitta, Translating for Children. London and New York, Garland, 2000.
Oittinen, Riitta (ed.), ‘Translation for Children / Traduction pour les enfants.’ In: Meta Vol. 48 (2003), 1-2, mai 2003.
Paloposki, Outi and Riitta Oittinen, ‘The Domesticated Foreign.’ In: Chesterman, Andrew, Natividad Gallardo and Yves Gambier (eds), Proceedings of the 1998 EST Conference in Granada. John Benjamins, 2000.
Robinson, Douglas, Becoming a Translator. An Accelerated Course. London and New York, Routledge, 1997.
Venuti, Lawrence, The Invisibility of the Translator. A History of Translation. London and New York, Routledge, 1995.
Zitawi, Jehan, ‘English-Arabic dubbed children's cartoons: Strategies for translating idioms’. In: Across languages and cultures 4 (2003) (2), p. 237-251.

Material

Carroll, Lewis, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Kuv. John Tenniel. New York, Bantam Books 1981 (1865).
Carroll, Lewis, Alicen seikkailut ihmemaassa. Illust. John Tenniel. Finnish trans. Alice Martin. Porvoo, Helsinki and Juva, WSOY, 1995.
Daly, Niki, Jamela's Dress. London, Frances Lincoln, 1999.
Daly, Niki, Jamelan Ieninki. Finnish trans. Riitta Oittinen. Kärkölä, Pieni Karhu, 2001 (a).
Daly, Niki, What's Cooking, Jamela? London, Frances Lincoln, 2001 (b).
Daly, Niki, Jamelan ystävä. Finnish trans. Riitta Oittinen. Kärkölä, Pieni Karhu, 2001 (c).
Kunnas, Mauri, Tarja Kunnas, Koirien Kalevala. Helsinki, Otava, 1992.
Kunnas, Mauri, Tarja Kunnas, Hundarnas Kalevala. Swedish trans. Lars Huldén. Helsinki, Otava, 1994.
Kunnas, Mauri, Tarja Kunnas, The Canine Kalevala. English trans. Tim Steffa. Helsinki, Otava, 2002 (1992).

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