Abstract
This chapter concentrates on the strategies of mitigation, standardization, simplification and explicitation, mainly using illustrations from the first two English-language translations of Korczak’s classic tale about King Matt from 1945 and 1986, and from the 2012 translation of his novel about Kaytek the Wizard. The chapter demonstrates that the first American translation, by Edith and Sidney Sulkin, contains various examples of mitigation, that is, of the manipulation of prose by deleting or toning down content regarded as inappropriate, as well as instances of standardizing the language. Another distinctive feature of the 1945 translation is that it was offered to American readers in a simplified version, with the translators often resorting to omission and condensation on sentence, paragraph and chapter levels. The chapter then examines the strategy of explicitation with reference to Richard Lourie’s translation of Korczak’s novel and, in particular, with reference to another book by Korczak which was translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones in 2012 as Kaytek the Wizard. It is demonstrated how the elliptical and laconic literary style of the source text is made more explicit by Lloyd-Jones both linguistically and culturally.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Primary Sources
Korczak, Janusz. 1945. Matthew the Young King. Trans. Edith and Sidney Sulkin. New York: Roy Publishers.
———. [1922] 1955. Król Maciuś Pierwszy. Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia.
———. [1933] 1985. Kajtuś czarodziej. Warszawa: Nasza Księgarnia.
———. 1986. King Matt the First. Trans. Richard Lourie. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
———. [1922] 1992. Król Maciuś Pierwszy. Król Maciuś na wyspie bezludnej. Warszawa: Oficyna Wydawnicza Latona.
———. 2012. Kaytek the Wizard. Trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones. New York: Penlight Publications.
Secondary Sources
Bensimon, Paul. 1990. Présentation. Palimpsestes 13 (4): ix–xiii.
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. [1986] 2001. Shifts in Cohesion and Coherence in Translation. In The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Venuti, Lawrence, 298–313. London/New York: Routledge.
Englund Dimitrova, Birgitta. 2005. Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Fischer, Martin B. 2012. “Gulpin’ Gargoyles” – Language Varieties in the Harry Potter Novels and Their Translations. In Translating Fictional Dialogue for Children and Young People, ed. Martin B. Fischer and Maria Wirf Naro, 43–79. Berlin: Frank and Timme.
Gambier, Yves. 1994. La retraduction, retour et detour. Meta 39 (3): 413–417.
House, Juliane. 2004. Linguistic Aspects of the Translation of Children’s Literature. In Übersetzung – Translation – Traduction. An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Kittel Harald, Paul Armin Frank, Norbert Greiner, Theo Hermans, Werner Koller, José Lambert, and Fritz Paul, 683–697. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.
Klaudy, Kinga. 2009. Explicitation. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 2nd ed., 104–108. London/New York: Routledge.
Lathey, Gillian. 2003. Time, Narrative Intimacy and the Child. Meta 48 (1/2): 233–240.
———. 2016. Translating Children’s Literature. New York: Routledge.
Looby, Robert. 2015. Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People’s Poland. Leiden/Boston: Brill/Rodopi.
Nida, Eugene. 1964. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill.
Oittinen, Riitta. 1990. The Dialogic Relation of Text and Illustration: A Translatological View. TextConText 1: 40–53.
O’Sullivan, Emer. 2005. Comparative Children’s Literature. London: Routledge.
Pokorn, Nike K. 2012. Post-Socialist Translation Practices: Ideological Struggle in Children’s Literature. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Séguinot, Candace. 1988. Pragmatics and the Explicitation Hypothesis. In TTR: Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction, vol. 2, 106–113.
Shavit, Zohar. 1986. Poetics of Children’s Literature. London: The University of Georgia Press.
Thomson-Wohlgemuth, Gabriele. 2009. Translation Under State Control: Books for Young People in the German Democratic Republic. New York: Routledge.
Van Coillie, Jan. 2012. Cool, Geil, Gaaf, Chouette or Super. The Challenges of Translating Teenage Speech. In Translating Fictional Dialogue for Children and Young People, ed. Martin B. Fischer and Maria Wirf Naro, 217–234. Berlin: Frank and Timme.
Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. [1958] 1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation. Trans. J. C. Sager and M.-J. Hamel. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Borodo, M. (2020). Mitigation, Standardization, Simplification and Explicitation. In: English Translations of Korczak’s Children’s Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38117-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-38117-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-38116-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-38117-2
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)