Translating Children’s Literature: between Social Challenges and Cultural Discovery Case studies: Little Women by Louisa May Alcott and A Little Princess by France Hodgson Burnett

Abstract

The subject of this dissertation is “Translating children literature: between Social Challenges and Cultural Discovery”. This research consists of two chapters; the first chapter is about a general overview about children’s literature, its translation, characteristics and the major factors involved in it. The aim of this research is to outline the various strategies obtained by translators when dealing with this subject. Furthermore, it will attempt to examine the difficulties of the translation of children literature. The second chapter adopts a comparative analytical approach. It will take two children’s stories and their translation as a case study. The first story is Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868), translated by Ali Moula asنساء صغيرات. And the second one is A Little Princess (1905) by France Hodgson Burnett, translated by Faika Djordjos as “ا ميرة الصغيرة”. Accordingly, the first part of the analysis is about the strategies and the difficulties of translating these two stories. However, the second part is a comparative analysis of the strategies used to translate these two children stories. Both stories will be investigated to discover the cultural differences and the social challenges which distinguish the English society and culture from the Arabic one. In fact, in this research we have observed that the two case studies are translated differently. In Little Women, the translator mostly used the strategy of adaptation and domestication and he also used foreignization. However, in the second story, A Little Princess, the translator used foreignization as the main strategy. Consequently, one may conclude that the translator of Little Women succeeded in giving a successful translation that involves respect of the social norms and at the same time cultural discovery. A good translation of children literature is accomplished when both strategies are used together because the two strategies complete each other. The translator must domesticate elements for making the text acceptable to the targetreader and at the same time foreignize other aspects to help the reader discover a new culture.