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Abstract:
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One underrated problem in literary translation studies has to do with the particularities of children’s and young adult literature when it comes to translating anthroponyms. Notwithstanding the increasing translation volume in the past decades of works of this category, little has been researched regarding the techniques to translate different kinds of anthroponyms and the determinants that shape those translation decisions. The aim of this paper is to descriptively analyze this particular branch of translation and to provide a review of its historical evolution since the last century. Therefore, this study presents corpus data identifying and categorizing the usual translation techniques and the decisive factors linked to their choice, and it later examines their practical application and frequency of use trough examples of Catalan and French translations of three different children’s and young adult books, along with an historical approach. Results show that the prevailing norm seems to be the recreation of the semantic meaning and comical effects of antrophonyms in the target language over the conservation of elements that act as cultural markers. This predisposition to domestication has been stable for the time period that analyzed books cover. However, there are evidences that recent works are slowly reducing the degree of adaptation and keeping more cultural markers intact, although it is not a strong tendency yet. In conclusion, all findings lead to the general assumption that, in both languages alike, the most frequently used techniques to translate anthroponyms tend to the pole of naturalization, given the crucial role that the target audience’s special requirements play in translation. |
