The two aims of this thesis are to analyse how expressive language can be employed and translated in children's literature and also to investigate the roles of power and historicity in this. Using a corpus of twenty children's books (the thirteen Lemony Snicket works, the two Alice books by Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and four books by Roald Dahl, The BFG, The Witches, Matilda, and George's Marvellous Medicine) and their forty-five translations to Swedish, I examine 749 examples of neologisms, 224 of names, 168 of idioms, 151 of allusions, 10 of puns, and 10 of dialects, for a combined total of 1322 distinct examples of expressive language and 1971 translations. I use quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analyses to study the examples of expressive language, their functions, and their translations. Based on this, I create a typology of expressive language and how it is employed, a typology of possible translatorial strategies for translating it, and I also show how the issues of power and time may influence the translation of expressive language in children's books. My findings suggest that in this corpus of texts, the authors frequently employ expressive language in ways that serve themselves rather than serving the child readers while some translators tend to assume that expressive language is too difficult or inappropriate for children and they therefore choose translatorial strategies that smooth out or remove such language, even to the extent of drastically changing features that the original authors purposely included. Additionally, this seems to have been the case in Sweden particularly during the period of the 1940s through the 1970s, which I suggest has something to do with world events and the ways in which they influenced the subject matter of children's literature and ideas about childhood
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:519858 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Epstein, Brett Jocelyn |
| Publisher | Swansea University |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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