La presente tesi di dottorato ha come oggetto la trasposizione televisiva di tre romanzi character driven: Heidi, Pippi Calzelunghe e The Story of Tracy Beaker. Questi, analizzati soprattutto dal punto di vista della protagonista femminile, sono stati studiati, così come i relativi adattamenti, utilizzando un modello metodologico di analisi che poggia le sue basi teoriche sia nell'estetica della letteratura per ragazzi sia nelle teorie dell'adattamento e della sceneggiatura. Il mercato audiovisivo e la tipologia di spettatori cambiano rapidamente e ciò rende necessaria un'attualizzazione non solo tematica, ma anche stilistica dell'opera originaria, alla ricerca di un compromesso tra la fedeltà al testo iniziale, necessaria per permettere al target l'immediata riconoscibilità dell'opera e dei personaggi, e l'esigenza di rispettare le richieste della contemporaneità. A livello accademico, lo studio degli adattamenti della letteratura per l'infanzia si è concentrato quasi esclusivamente in ambito cinematografico e non televisivo, nonostante quest'ultimo fornisca molti spunti di riflessione tanto sul processo di adattamento in sé quanto sulla serialità. Il presente lavoro si propone perciò di andare a riempire il gap teorico sull'argomento, ponendosi necessariamente a cavallo di due ambiti, -la letteratura e l'audiovisivo. Di conseguenza, l'approccio privilegiato è più letterario che pedagogico e si interseca con gli studi sull'adattamento e sull'industria audiovisiva. / This PhD dissertation investigates the adaptations from children's novels into television series, with a focus on three character-driven stories: Heidi, Pippi Longstockings and The Story of Tracy Beaker. Starting from the original novels, investigated mostly from the point of view of the female protagonist, the study then analyses the corresponding television adaptations, whether animated or live action, through a methodology that has its theoretical basis both in the aesthetics of children's literature and in the screenwriting theories. Nowadays, the audiovisual market and therefore the public are changing rapidly, making it necessary to update the thematic and the stylistic features of the original works from which the adaptations are drawn. Actually, adaptation is often a compromise between the contemporary market demand and the fidelity to the content, necessary to fulfil the expectations of the target audience. Surprisingly, there is a scarcity of critical literature on children's television adaptations, even if they represent a very rich topic as they raise specific issues both on the adaptation process itself and on serialisation. The present work, therefore, aims to fill the existing gap in the field of children's adaptations, placing itself where two critical areas, literature and media, meet. Consequently, the primary narrative approach intersects with studies on adaptation and audiovisual industry.

This thesis examines the translation of culture-specific phenomena in children’s literature with a theoretical framework based on “translation studies”. In the translation of children’s literature, translators generally choose translations that brings the content closer to the target culture, creating an “acceptable” translation. At the same time, these choices distance the translation from the culture of the original text. The opposite, translations which remain faithful to the original, are called “adequate” with the terminology of translation studies.This thesis presents the result of the parallel reading of the original Madicken på Junibacken, a children’s book written by famous Swedish author Astrid Lindgren, and the Italian version, Martina di Poggio di Giugno, translated by Fiorella Onesti and Isabella Fanti (Salani, Gl’Istrici, 2003). During the reading of the two books, the phenomena specific to the Swedish language culture (realia, in translation studies’ terminology) were collected, listed, grouped according to type of realia (names of persons and places, food, idiomatic expressions, songs and games) and the translation strategy used. The grouping according to translation strategy took as its starting point the ten strategies described by Osimo (2008). The analysis confirmed the initial hypothesis that Martina di Poggio di Giugno would be, like many other translations of children’s books, an “acceptable” translation. A complimentary analysis of corresponding realia in two other translations of Astrid Lindgren books, the Italian versions of Pippi Longstocking and Bill Bergson, Master Detective, showed that one realia can be translated in different ways, leading to different results. The translations in the second phase of the analysis were deemed as slightly less “acceptable” and therefore closer to equivalence with the original texts.