Conclusion

Abstract

One of the aims of this book has been to shed new light on Polish-to-English translations of children’s fiction and the translation of Korczak in particular, but also to propose a new research perspective for the study of the translation of children’s literature in general. To this end, an inventory of translation strategies and key theoretical concepts was developed in Chap. 2 and applied in the linguistic analysis of the English-language translations of Korczak’s fiction, in particular of his most famous children’s novel Król Maciuś Pierwszy. Comparison and contrast of the way these strategies are used in the different translations provides fascinating insights into possible historical and ideological factors at play in determining the decisions arrived at by the different translators. For example, in their 1945 version Edith and Sidney Sulkin highlight the fairy-tale character of the original story, which is not foregrounded in the subsequent English-language versions of the novel. Richard Lourie’s 1986 translation privileges the specificity of the source culture, which is noticeable in his treatment of some culture-specific items and names. In 1990, on the other hand, Adam Czasak not only prioritizes the values of the target culture but also uses a very informal style. In contrast, perhaps the most salient characteristic of Adam Fisher and Ben Torrent’s 2014 translation is its formality, which contributes to presenting Korczak’s fictional universe as more refined, dignified and grand, as though underlining the courtly and royal context of the novel about the boy king. Each of these translations is based on Korczak’s same source text, yet the various translators have metonymically activated and privileged different reserves of meaning. Literary translators have their own historically and socio-culturally conditioned convictions, worldviews and artistic visions, and may decide to highlight different aspects of the same source text. Such differences may be tracked through a systematic examination of recurring linguistic patterns with the use of an analytic framework accommodating such concepts as style, formality, sociolect, ideology and the metonymics of (re)translation, and consisting of such strategies as mitigation, simplification, explicitation, didacticism, censorship, fairytalization, hyperbolization, sentimentalization, infantilization, standardization, stylization, modernization, foreignization and cultural assimilation.