APPUNTI LINGUA INGLESE II E-F (13131) A.A. 2021-2022, Appunti di Lingua Inglese

Scarica APPUNTI LINGUA INGLESE II E-F (13131) A.A. 2021-2022 e più Appunti in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity! MODULO A It is not easy to write a book for children, and neither is translating. It is not easy to work with children who not only have a different language but a different culture.  We will analyze books different from a linguistic and visual point of view. In books like “Alice in Wonderland”, the focus will be put on both pictures and text, and how pictures depicture the text and vice versa (the language of Carroll is a language of another century with which he plays).  Roald Dahl is the author of “The Chocolate Factory” and “The big friendly Giant (GGG)”, and uses an innovative and fun language.  “Hiroshima no pika” by Toshi Maruki, who is a Japanese writer and illustrator, and explained what happened in Hiroshima during the Second World War, and to do so he had to use illustrations, but how do you explain horror to a child age?  There were many versions of “Harry Potter”. Some versions, from the cover, are understood to be for kids, and some others are meant for adults (the cover is dark, there’s nothing compelling or nice about it). More versions of “Harry Potter” were even in the shape of a picturebook (in the book there are pictures, but also interactive elements: they capture the attention also of the readers that do not like to read a lot making the book look more like a game than a book).  CERN (Centro di Ricerche Internazionali) managed to render the topic understandable for children by creating a pop-up, explaining something that seems very complicated making it understandable to children. It is needed to learn how to transform the information so that it is accessible to children.  “Paddington suitcase” (traditional British character), there is a paper suitcase that reminds the children of the character, and inside there are small picturebooks.  It will be put focus on the translation of names. One of the examples is “Neville Longbottom”, one of the main characters of the “Harry Potter” saga, and that in Italian has been translated as “Neville Paciock”. The name recalls the characteristics of the character (it is based on the way he looked). Starting from the twenty-first century there has been a rising interest in translation. Physics and mathematics are very old studies. The field of translation was established in the 1970s: Susan Bennetts, who is considered one of the founding fathers of the discipline, was born in the 1940s and started writing something important towards the end of the 1970s. From the twenty-first century, translation started to be seen as an instrument because of a few reasons:  global changes o in the last forty years, there has been more mass migration, mostly from third world countries, in which the language and the culture are not well known. Mass migration is a never-ending problem: think about Afghanistan refugees trying to make themselves understood in another language in another country. People in mass migrations do not only cross countries, but they also cross cultures. o 9/11 attack, which can be considered a turning point. That is when the American administration realized that there was a side of the world, South-Eastern countries, that they did not know. People wanted to know more about these cultures. o global warming: a threat not only to rich countries, but that touches everyone. We are trying to communicate to find a solution and to do that we have to translate from one language to the other. o interlocking economic system: the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lasted from 1954 to 1991, the year in which Gorbachev dismembered the Soviet Union. There is an interlocking economic system that leaves languages the job to solve the problem and avoid conflicts. o expansion of global communication systems: in the last 20-25 years, there has been something to provide effortless worldwide communication, the Internet. The assumptions about the fact that translations are easy are wrong: translating is not easy, especially because there are gaps. Theories in translators started acknowledging the difficulties that translators have when they try to reach the total equivalence between source language (language from which the translator translates) and target language (language to which the translator translates). One might be tempted to say that a child’s book is a book that a child is reading and that an adult’s book is a book that adults should read. This is a very simplistic way to see things. It does not work that way, because the boundary between children’s literature and young adults’ literature/adults’ literature is really blurred: books that would be expected being for adults can be read by children, and books that would be expected to be read by children are enjoyed also by adults.  “The Little Prince” is one of those books that seem to be written for children because it is nice and easy to understand, but many messages that are in the story are meant for adults.  “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” is not a book for children, even if it is given to children because it is simple and short, and there are pictures. The child does understand the story, but not the complete messages that the author is proposing to the readers. Children even today continue to read books that are meant for adults. Instead, some books that have been written for children have been claimed as their own by adults.  “The Lord of the Rings” is for adults, but “the Hobbit” was written for children (middle school children, that are in the “transition year” in which they transit from children’s literature to adults’ literature), but it is bought by adults.  The first “Harry Potter” books written by J.K. Rowling are for children, while the last books are for young adults, and it is understood by the language that is used, and the much more obscure themes. J.K. Rowling has thought about the story as an evolving story: the characters are growing in the story, they are becoming teenagers, and readers are expected to become older as well. Children today appear to be more sophisticated than a few generations ago. The material that they are exposed to has changed dramatically because of television, and YouTube…, which has exposed them to new realities, and this has forced adults to re-consider over the years what is appropriate in children’s literature. The content of children’s literature is limited by children’s experience in understanding. Enjoyment Reading children’s books should be fun, it should be an enjoyable experience. Children’s literature should not be obligatory educational, and there are books that are only for enjoyment. “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is a book created just for fun. It is a book that today has been re-written several times, since in the original version the language is outdated, and it would be complicated for children today to appreciate the story and the language, but when the book came out the book it was all for the fun of reading and the fun of language. Lewis Carroll creates a new language, playing with it and creating rhymes: he was not trying to teach something to children, who should only concentrate on enjoying the book. It teaches children how to think By reading, books children are let to experience emotions and are taught different ways of thinking, and how the world works: the experience of children is limited, and everything they know comes from their routine. They know nothing about different life experiences. Through narrative, they experience different stories and emotions and are taught how to think. Opportunity to understand human behavior and the immense versatility of experiences People all live in this world and must understand how to live in it. Children’s literature can teach children how to live in the world. A book may take the child reading it to a different place. The child goes together with the main character of the book on an adventure and feels for the first time the same feelings as the character. By experiencing the same things, the child starts to understand how people usually behave, so how the child should behave in life as well. Imagination  Literature can develop children’s imagination the most and therefore every child should be pushed to read or listen to stories at a very early age. It helps them consider people, and ideas in different ways: if the writing of the book is good, it can pick the child’s curiosity and develop imagination.  Children can entertain ideas they have never considered before and ask themselves “what if…?”. New experiences  Children can be given new perspectives of the world. There are books that can take the child to a very distant place, teaching the child how different people from different cultures and different parts of the world live.  New feelings o Adventure; o Excitement; o Struggle. Educational values  A lot of people may think that all children’s books should be educational, but there is no need to teach them something all the time, some books can be read as just pure fun. A lot of material is created to educate children, to teach them something. The years in which the language is learned are exciting: the language is learned starting from the day the child is born but is earned starting from age two/three/four (but this does not mean that before this age the mind is not understanding language). During this period children are linguistic geniuses because they make sense of all linguistic elements, and it is in this period that they need to be exposed to children’s literature because it helps them to learn the language. The children that have grown up reading a lot of books or whose parents read to them a lot are the children that are going to be the best writers and speakers since they have the best and most variable vocabulary. The child has fun hearing those words and will try to repeat them because they sound funny. Children are forced to practice the sounds of words, and this is educational (children are taught without even realizing it). “Winnie the Pooh” is for enjoyment, but it is also educational from a linguistic point of view. Winnie the Pooh is a nice little bear who loves, just like a child, to create poems, whose sound is nice. It is educational because the protagonist teaches poems and poetry, and rhythm as well. The child is going to memorize what Winnie the Pooh sings in the story.  Development of fluency and understanding of language. A child should be exposed to about forty-five books per year, but children today read on average two books per year. Children should be pushed to read books in different forms. In the United States, there is something called “literature across the curriculum”: in American schools, teachers of different subjects inform the English teacher about the topics that are discussed in their subjects, so that the English teacher can propose to the students a story that is connected to those topics. PROTAGONISTS The narrative voice is speaking directly to the characters or to the child reader. The narrator asks questions to the reader. If the narrator is speaking in the third person and there is a lack of warmth, then the text is probably intended for adult readers. The narrator in children’s literature accompanies the child protagonist and the child reader with the story until the end. The narrator’s voice is used to provide background information (for example, to introduce a character). The narrator is telling in a few words a lot of action that is happening. The narrator moves the action along without spending too much time describing things and actions. It does have to move along quite fast to avoid the child to get bored. The child needs action. In children’s literature, the story starts from a very well-known place (the child’s home, but also the school, or any place that the child considers home), then the child goes on an adventure, and the story always ends with the child returning to that very exact place.  “Harry Potter”’s first volumes start with him at a home he does not love and in which he is not cared for. He then goes on an adventure in Hogwarts, and, in the end, he returns to that very same home. When he becomes older and more independent, he does not return home anymore but goes to another place that he considers more like his home. Protagonists start from a home-like place, go on an adventure, and then return to that place. (Percy Jackson). In adults’ literature, there isn’t a specific narrative structure, but everything goes. The story can start anyplace, anywhere, anytime, and it can end anywhere. Adults have the experience to understand a very complicated narrative structure. In children’s literature, the chronological order of events is followed: one thing happens after the other, there aren’t flash-forwards or flashbacks, because a child would get lost trying to understand that, and when a child doesn’t understand something, the child stops reading. In young adults’ literature, there is still the chronological order of events, but there is also the start of an order of thoughts. The protagonist starts to follow thoughts, so remembers something, and goes back in time. In adults’ literature, everything goes (flashbacks, present, flashforwards). Adults can understand difficult thoughts and the management of time in complicated ways. “Danny, Champion of the Worlds” by Roald Dahl, came out in a magazine in 1959 as a short story for adults, but the author decided to pick up the story again in 1975 because the audience he had in mind was children. He had to change a few things, like the language and the use of time: the adult version of the book followed the order of thoughts of the characters, while the children’s version followed the chronological orders of the events. Moreover, the dialogues were rewritten for children, and a lot of linguistic elements were changed. The language is simple, and a lack of sophisticated irony is seen since up to a certain age, children are scientifically proven to not understand irony because they take everything literally. There is a lack of complex symbolism and metaphors because children do not have the elements to understand those. The vocabulary is simple, even if sometimes there are some words that are complicated and do not belong to a typical vocabulary of a child, but in that case, the writer always explains the word. Words from “spoken children’s language” are used: children have their own vocabulary. Children accept words that they do not yet know if these words do not appear too often, or else they’ll just put the book down. The vocabulary is simple but must be specific: it cannot be as generic as a text that is meant for an adult reader can be because children want to picture in their mind what the author is describing. The authors of children’s literature choose colorful and detailed words that paint pictures. In language, sometimes there are “weedy words”. When an author writes, a lot of words are used which are unnecessary and can be eliminated. That is exactly what it should be done in children’s literature. SENTENCES In children’s literature, shorter sentences are utilized. With short sentences, the action moves much faster. Longer sentences can be found in children’s literature, but they work the best when descriptions or explanations are needed, even if they are not going to be too long. Extract → there are some short sentences and some long sentences. The longer sentences are in the middle of the text. The shorter sentences can be found at the beginning. Short sentences follow one another for the action to move faster (the rhythm is quicker). There is only one long sentence, the rest is short. DESCRIPTION Latin and French, which were only learned by the nobility). In English, there are indeed words that have Germanic origins which are utilized in everyday vocabulary. Anderson also noticed that paragraphs and sentences were shorter and that there were few differences in syntax as Peddiccord had previously noticed. It is better to use direct speech in children’s literature, so there is going to be a very conversational style utilized in the book. A lot of children’s books remind of the typical story-telling technique. Before children’s books existed, there was an oral story-telling, and now children’s literature reminds of that narrative style. Children's books can be associated with poetry or myth. TYPICAL ELEMENTS OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Poetry has rhythm, but prose also has it. To create rhythm in prose, there can be the repetition of certain words, juxtapositions of sounds, and certain images, and all these techniques create rhythm. In the example, rhythm is created through:  the repetition of “w” sounds (will, winter, with, wind, blows, wind);  the repetition of “and” (we feed the sheep and the cows and Jack and Old Bess);  the punctuation;  colors (blue and gray and green, yellow eyes); The author creates rhythm, the text is figurative and poetic. Children’s books are usually shorter than those for adults (the “Harry Potter” books are about two hundred pages long in the first two-three volumes when the book was intended for children, but after the fourth volume there are hundreds of pages). The short length of children’s books is justified by the fact that children do not have a long attention span and can understand and remember smaller chunks of information. These are the reasons why short forms of literature, such as myth, fables, or folk tales have always been considered appropriate for children. Young adults’ books are not as long as adults’ books, but not as short as children’s books. The moral ideas need to be clear, there are no criteria in children’s literature and young adults’ literature besides black and white: the characters are either good or bad, and there is nothing in between. In “real life” there can be shady characters that are between good and bad, but for children, this must be clear. Young adults’ literature and children’s literature are distinguished by the way that they look or the way that they are presented. When the way they look and are presented to the public is considered, it is talked about paratext. The peritext is everything between and on the covers, the epitext is the reviews, the articles, the placement the book is given, that is, generally, everything that is published about the book. If peritext and epitext are put together, there is technically the paratext. In children’s literature, it can be understood what the book is about (and to which audience the book aims at) by its cover and its size. Some children’s books are marketed for adults by the use of a different cover:  In the adult edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” there are dark colors, and a locomotive is portrayed but looks scary, whereas in the edition aimed at children, the locomotive is red, and an illustration of the locomotive (and not a real-life locomotive) is used. Children’s stories are nearly always illustrated, young adults’ books are sometimes illustrated, while adults’ novels are not illustrated.  “The Children of Green Knowe” was initially thought to be an adult’s book, but the author insisted on her son’s drawings to be used as illustrations, and the book was then marketed as a children’s book. Illustrations are so important that they may change the intended audience. “The Little Prince” is a nice story that children like because it is simple and has illustrations, the young hero is a child, and there are many talking elements, such as a chatty rose or talking animals. It is however a book with an uncertain audience because the messages that are found in the book are meant for adults. Titles of children's books are short and snappy and tend to be funny. They range from three to five words; they often rhyme, or there is a repetition of sounds. Most of the time, in a library, the child is going to choose a book, and one of the first elements that the child is going to look at are the images on the cover and the title. Children are going to love the title if it is interesting and funny. There is a need of playing with poetic devices like alliteration and rhyme. Verbs are used in titles and reflect the themes of the book: reading the title, the reader knows what the book is about. After the title, the child opens the book and reads the first few lines, and if they are enjoyable to them, then the child will take the book home. If the first few lines are not interesting, the child will put the book down. For this reason, in the first lines, the author usually introduces the main character, and not only that, but also the setting, and the problem, and then the author keeps the action moving. In a novel for adults, the problem will be introduced within the first chapter, because adults have the patience to wait. Exercise The dust jacket is made of paper most of the time and it is used to protect the book from water, dust, or anything that might damage the book. Children generally do not like dust jackets (a child is not patient, so if something bothers them, they are going to eliminate it). A dust jacket is the paper wrapping around a hardcover book to help protect the actual cover. Originally made of fabric and intended to keep the book clean, today the jacket is highly designed and styled to catch the eye of a reader via interesting art and type. The jacket may portray the same exact pattern that is portrayed on the actual cover of the book, or something totally different. The hardcover does not bend since it is made of cardboard, whereas the paperback edition does bend, so the dust jacket would not work. The dust jacket is not only important because it protects the book, but because it gives very important information about the book: those pieces of information are given in the front and back flaps, which must be considered as the extensions of the book itself. They fold around the hardcover: in the front one there is usually a summary of the story, and in the back flap there is a biography of the author. Typical elements that are generally found in a cover:  Author;  Title;  Illustration or photo;  Subtitle (extension of the title, it draws the viewer in and interests the reader);  Spine:  Book summary;  Endorsement;  Barcode with the price of the book. Whether it is a hardcover book or a paperback book, there is always a spine, that is the central panel of a book’s binding that connects the front and back cover to the pages. It is the part of the book that it is shown on the shelf. Now there is a lot of work put into spines, especially if a series of books is proposed (the “Harry Potter” books collection presents spines, which, if combines, can create an illustration). What it is used to hold the book together:  Trade cover: binding for which pages are sewn and glued along the spine with covers made of still chipboard.  Paperback : pages are only glued along the spine and covered with heavyweight paper.  Library binding: more durable, cloth reinforcement along the spine and a stronger sewing method. If the book breaks, the book is not thrown away, but the binding is re- done. Endpapers are part of the artistic work of the book and are the four glued pages that appear at the beginning and end of hardcover books. The book in the example talks about a child who helps toads cross the street and arrive at a field where they can lay their eggs. The colors on the cover are also used in the endpapers, which reminds of the weather. This book talks about frogs and the different types of frogs that live in the United States. In the endpapers, there is extra information that supplements the story inside the book. The endpapers indicate what frogs are in the United States placing them in different states on a map. This story talks about a young boy that can hear but has deaf parents, so he is trying to explain to them how the sounds sound like using sign language. The ending papers are part of the story and part of the illustrations of the book. The half-title page is a page in the front of the book that repeats just the book’s title. The copyright page is a page at the front or back of a book with information about the publisher and year of publication; the number of printings, who owns (holds the copyright of) the text, photos or pictures, maps or charts, and any specific images. The title page is the page that follows the half-title page and contains the title, author and illustrator bylines, and the publisher’s logo or imprint. There are different kinds of illustrations. Vignettes are small illustrations alongside the text that are used to move the narrative forward and allow the illustrator to make use of blank space to tell the story. Vignettes can be found below, next to, or above the paragraph or line to which they are referring. Vignettes are used to create movement in the story and push it forward. There are also spots, that are small oval or circular free- floating images, without a background scene. book, or an illustrated book, and the child will be able to understand at least the basic reading skills (not the language or the text, but the visual elements). Contemporary culture is filled with visual images, so children learn visual literacy long before they learn verbal literacy. Children know how to speak when they are about two and a half/three years old, but the visual reading is already there, and that’s because culture today is filled with visual images. Do adults lose their ability to read pictures? Yes, and some of it is because of the commercial part of bookselling: adults are seen as people who do not enjoy images, which is true because adults are expected from the society to leave behind the visual part and just concentrate on the text. Children both hear the words and the illustrations at the same time, because they are read the book. Children get a much fuller sense of the picture book, experiencing it more than the adult does. Adults read the text and then look at the images. The picture book was made in 1658 and is called “Orbis Sensualium Pictus”. The images and the text are right next to each other. In the 17th century, picture books are going to be didactic, and are not going to be made for enjoyment but to teach children something (moral and social rules). In “Struwwelpeter” published in 1845, the images would not be appealing to today’s children. The intent was not to make children enjoy the experience of reading but to teach them something, even by using pictures or elements that may frighten them. The genre takes off in the late 19th century because, at this point, it is going to cost less to illustrate books. It was taken for granted that the text may have few pictures or none, because it cost too much to include an illustration, even if it was meant for children. During the Victorian times, illustrations become visible, and it was possible to include color, and illustrations started to be associated with children’s literature. This was also a time when childhood was perceived as pleasurable, so the illustrations were also joyous. VISUAL ELEMENTS IN THE BOOK There are several elements in the books, and one of the most important ones is space: the way type is laid out, spaced on page, and border (white borders or not, shifting borders), these are important choices that have to be made by the illustrator. The format is also important, because of first impression. Children love small books because they can handle them, and hold them in their hands, but children also love very big books (huge in their hands, it is really hard for them to turn the pages of the book, but that’s why they like it so much: because it is unusual). Color is also very important since each color is associated with different moods and feelings. There is a need to look at how colors are utilized in images because there’s a meaning for everything. Shades are also important: there is the need to put attention to the degrees of brightness or darkness.  Left: Beatrix Potter designed her own images, the drawing that it is utilized is quite light, since it is watercolor. The color is gentle and gives a natural sensation.  Right: there are more saturated color, there is no shading. Children love both types of drawings and the colors that are used. Shapes are also important. Round shapes are associated with softness. In other stories, the illustrator decides to use straight angular lines, because they provide more energy to the story. The sensations that the reader gets from different images also depend on the type of shapes and the lines that are seen in the visual elements. The shapes can affect the mood of the story. Artistic medium and style also mean considering the use of collage, oils, pastel watercolors, black and white drawings and sketches, or woodcuts. Illustrators might use the more realistic kinds of drawings, drawing everything in detail, but can be also abstract, impressionistic, surreal, or others. The different techniques that are used to create the images of a picture book or of an illustrated book are considered “style”, which affects the story. Same stories, but the style is different. Left  it is more realistic (everything is seen in detail), and scarier (wolf portrayed in the cover page). Little Red Riding Hood seems serious and concerned, she is not smiling. She is in the middle of the forest, with the wolf in the back, hidden behind the trees. Whenever the child sees this image, the child is going to associate the story with its scarier part. The colors are dark. Parents and children can read this book, but the target is adults. Right  it is simple and abstract; Marshall gives more light to the story (more positive and gentler). The colors are saturated, and brighter. The very common shape that is used here is round, Little Red Riding Hood is depicted with a very round shape, and this gives a more positive idea of the character, giving her softness. She is smiling. There aren’t any details in the background. A black background tells that not everything will be positive in the story, but at the front, everything seems nice, positive, cheerful, and colorful. Attention must be put also to symbols, such as crosses, flags, and the type of trees that are included in the images. There is something called “cultural code”: for example, in many cultures, the dark is associated with evil, while the light is associated with something good and positive. Picture books both depend on and teach such conventional assumptions. In the western world, Snow-white represents goodness, gentleness and this cause also the way in which she is drawn (high saturation, round shape, colorful), while the evil witch represents the evil character. Regarding the use of lights and shadows, there is a very nice book which is “Wolves in the Walls”. The light coming from the television should be casting a different sort of shadow from the boy lying down on the floor (the shadow should be cast behind him rather than in front). The colors are warm, and this could easily be a cozy living room scene, but the shadow at the edge of his room combined with the off-kilter perspective creates an uneasy atmosphere. There is a scene in the story where there is a home environment that should be a welcoming environment, with two children watching television. The items are there, the colors are there, but there is something that is off, and that is not working. Something that is casting a little bit of darkness in this situation. The shadows, for example, are not working correctly. Looking at the right part of the image, the illustration works with the text, and the text is presented in different fonts and sizes. The emotion that the girl is feeling are not positive, and she is feeling scared. The sizes of figures are also very important: figures are put in relation to each other, so one character may be bigger than the other, and also or can be put in relation to the background. Here, Little Red Riding Hood is much smaller than the wolf. That gives the reader the sensation that she is defenseless, she is not as strong as the wolf and may be inferior. In comparison to the background, Red Riding Hood is small. She is small in comparison to the environment, and this is also another emotional element. Chinese ideogram is a picture of the thing it represents. Ideograms have evolved during the centuries, but at the beginning they were little drawings that resembled what they represented. As the century progressed, each ideogram became more stylized. Considering the short life spans, the concept of childhood didn’t exist. A child was born and almost immediately after the child was considered an adult, and had the same chores of adults. Only a few could read and those. Spoken words were used for entertainment and education. People could not read or write, so they used to tell stories (oral story telling). Books were costly, only rich people could afford them, and so poor people relied on spoken words for education. These were all topics that worked well for an uneducated audience because in the Middle Ages there was no distinction between fantasy and reality. Science and scientific matters were unknown, so people saw things and attached immediately a mythical and spiritual element to them. Fantasy was blurred, and it is something that still could be seen today in children. In Middle Ages this was something that happened to everybody. In the Renaissance there is the beginning of having books that contained text and images. There is an early age of illustrated books, and one of the most famous ones is the 1461 “Der Edelstein”, the first example of a book with text and image printed together. These moments are important because of the Revolution of Gutenberg regarding the movable-type printing press, which he took from the Chinese and then improved. Gutenberg’s invention changed everything dramatically because from then, books could be printed in an easier and cheaper way and became cheaper and more available. It does not mean that everybody had a book, but even the poorest families had at least one book, the Bible. This was the first proper illustrated book that was ever printed in England. Caxton was not the one that came up with the story, the original writer, or better saying, the person that first narrated the story, is Aesop, a slave in ancient Greece that was famous back then as a storyteller. Researchers also say that he was not the one that came out with the story, but those stories go back thousands of years. These stories contained a moral and were popular among children also today. The stories are for children and adults and contain typical elements that children loved, such as the use of animals. Another important book in children’s literature is “Orbis Sensualium Pictus” by Comenius published in 1657, and this is generally seen as the first children’s picture book. Today it would be as an illustrated book. It was meant for children and was originally published in Latin, and it was then translated in English. It gives an interesting look and perception of the 17th century society. The Renaissance is the era in which there is a growing interest in the young. Books for children continue to be inferior, but there is an increasing sense of interest in children’s literature. Between adulthood and child’s birth, there is childhood, which up until then had no consideration at all. There are books such as “The Boke Named the Governor” of 1531, “The Scholemaster” of 1570 and “Book of Martyrs” of 1563. The books were not written to be enjoyed by children, but they were written to teach them something, how to behave. The “Life of Saints” was utilized to give examples, as well as the “Book of Martyrs”, which would not be proposed to children today, because it portrays unaccetable violence. The title becomes part of the illustrations. Later in the text, the text is tangled with the images. It is an illustrated book: the book contains sever games and amusements, at the top of this pages there is a letter of the alphabet and below this letter there is an illustration of the activity and the game that the child could make. There is a verse describing that activity and game and right below there is a moral lesson, whether it was connected to the game or not. One another important person in the XVIII century is Jean Jacques Rousseau, that is a French philosopher, who had another point of view in the concept of children’s reading. His ideas about education were expressed in the book “Emilie” (1762), in which he emphasizes the importance of moral development. For Rousseau, a moral development could be best accomplished by living a simple life. Rousseau’s ideas encourage moralistic books that taught children how to behave and act properly as human beings in society. Many writers started writing many moralistic tales. For the rest of the XVIII century and the beginning of the XIX century, there are still moralistic stories trying to teach children how to behave correctly in society. Before the educational matter was completely separated from children’s book, there is a long wait. The didactic element in children’s books persisted until the early XIX century. Alongside the moralistic builds, there is the revival of old folktales, for example in the book entitled “Tales of Mother Goose” (1729). There are also books which are still popular today, such as “Cinderella”, “Beauty and the Beast”, that Disney has utilized. Those folktales come from an oral tradition. At the beginning of the 19th century, there are also the Grimm brothers who collected a great number of folktales, because they believed that those folktales were about to disappear (there was an oral tradition which was quickly fading). They wrote the tales and published them (those folktales were not just meant for children, but also for adults). These tales are still quite famous. Because they were so successful, the Grimm brothers inspired a lot of works concerning folk tales. There’s the work of Hans Christiana Anderson in Denmark, and in Norway there is the same type of published materials by Asbhornsen and Moe. They were bringing folktales with moralistic meaning to both adults and children: they were perceived as a good instrument for both ranges of ages. Before children’s literature could mature, it had to abandon morals didacticism, because until there is moral didacticism in children’s literature, there is still an adult-centered kind of literature. In an adult-centered kind of literature, the message is more interesting than the literary quality. The books that are seen in 18/19th century tend to offer what adults believed it was good for children, and not necessarily what children themselves wanted to enjoy, or what they needed. It was in the late 19th century that talented authors committed to quality writing for children opposed to moral lessons began to write successfully. Before the 19th century there are a lot of women writing children’s books just for hobby, and not as true professionals. They were testing the field, but this means also that the quality of these books was not good. The reasons that brought to these changes are:  Strengthening of the family unit: there was a lower infant mortality rate, and that helped stabilize the family.  Rapid development of technology, that made possible a cheaper process of the production of books, that were however printed on high quality paper and with high quality colors. The printing was high quality, and there were colored pictures and images.  Low rise of the status of women, whose status became more stable, and this is also one of the reasons why women dominated the field: they started to concentrate on quality other than educational content.  Widespread of educational opportunities for both adults and children. There is mandatory education, and the legislation that obliged children to go to school, at least on an elementary level. This created a base of readers, and these young readers needed books to read.  Growth of the middle class, which brought also further the reading audience. They have the money to buy books for themselves and for their children. Writers needed to appeal if they wanted to be able to earn a living, so writing for children became a profession only in the second half of the 19th century. The Victorian time can be referred to as the “Golden Age” for children’s literature. The reign of Queen Victoria is a very promiscuous period for children’s literature and for picture books/illustrated books. Caldecott is perceived as the father of the picture book. In his works a sort of subtext emerges that expands the story. Pictures perceive sometimes in a different direction, and contain an additional element, and enrich and accompany the story. Caldecott invented picture books, and he is doing something that no one else has done before. Why is this a picture book and not an illustrated book? It is a picture book because visual elements are needed to accompany the text (even if the text would also work well by itself). The images expand the text because they describe what is happening in the story. However, in some pictures there are some elements or characters that are not mentioned in the story (the images sometimes contain elements that are not included in the linguistic part of the story). The text and the images are working together in one way, but in another way, they are working separately. The ending of the story would not really work today because it is a bad kind of ending, but back then it was funny and was appreciated. Back then, the pictures were mostly black and white, and just some of them were colored, and this was because it would have costed too much, and nobody would have bought such an expensive book. There are elements such as repetitions, rhymes, and silly words that children enjoy and would enjoy also today: the merit of the author is having realized that those elements appeal children. What were kids reading back then? Children love silly words, or rhymes, and they love to repeat them: the adult is reading, so the child starts giggling when the child first sees a series of rhymes. The adult mentions these words all over again as they are shown in the story, so the child starts participating in the story as well, knowing exactly when these words are going to be mentioned. It can be considered an activity that catches the child and enforces the child to use these words that do not make sense but makes him exercise on pronunciation. In the second half of the 19th century the literature was dominated by adventure books, or so called “boys stories” (stories written for boys) and fantastic books.  Adventure o There is the need of looking at the historical background in which the book was published. In the second half of the 19th century, the British empire, which was the strongest empire in the whole world, expanded even more. In Britain there was also lots of patriotism and nationalism. They were living in a country that was very powerful under an economic and political point of view, so there is a lot of patriotism and nationalism that were portrayed in the stories that were written at that time. In these books, there are characters going on an adventure far away and meeting pirates, discovering new lands, but always from the point of view of patriotism: the characters are always dominating over the countries and their people. o “Mr. Midshipman Easy” (1836), “With Clive in India” (1884): Henty traveled widely throughout the British empire and its colonies and loved to write adventure books about the places that he visited. o “Robinson Crusoe”, which also inspired “Lord of the Flies”.  Fantasy o “Treasure Island” by Stevenson, which is another important children’s book that is still very famous today. The book may be perceived as old, but if the language is changed and is modernized, the content of the story is still modern today. It is adventurous, melodramatic, so adults love it, but children today may also love it provided with a modern kind of translation. o “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll. The book portrays a very strange story and has no sense, it is also very ironic. The story is meant to be entertaining and does not give any educational morals. It is a fun story to read, but there are some ironic elements. The language is weird, since Carroll plays with it a lot. The reader is not supposed to learn anything from this book, and that’s okay, they were created for children to enjoy and laugh. o George Macdonald is considered one of the first Victorian’s fantasy writers. o “The brownies and other tales” of Ewing, important because she inspired boy and girl scouts in the United States. The period between WWII and the 1950s/1960s can be considered a Second Golden Age: this definition can be used especially in the United States because there are post-war prosperities. After many years of people struggling with very difficult and violent moments, there is some sort of calmness and prosperity, the economic situation gets better and this also means more books getting published, and more people have money to buy books. In this second Golden Age, there is also a baby boom, so there are more children in general and there is an increase in childhood being seen as a field of study, from both a sociological and a psychological view. There are serious studies concerning childhood in general and how to raise a child from both a sociological and a psychological view. There is a growing emphasis on education at all levels: there is a more genuine interest in what goes on in school, what teachers do, and what they are proposing in schools, and at this time, parents also start to get more involved in the education of their children in school as well. This is also considered a Golden Age in children’s literature because there are children’s books’ awards, that are established  Newbery Medal  Caldecott Medal American medals have the name of very important writers for children’s literature, so they use those medals to recognize important works in children’s literature.  Carnegie Medal  Greenaway Medal This indicates two things:  More importance was given to the quality of books, so not only if the book is cheap or available, but if the book teaches something, and the quality of the pictures and the writing is high (and when those characteristics are met, then there is a medal).  Children’s books have become a large money income. In fantasy there are several series that appear in the 1950s/1960s that are still big and well known today. There are also sequels when the first books are a success. This is a time in which the publisher will invest in the book will ask the writer to publish it again. Dahl is one of the most famous writers for children’s literature and he is famous also for the way in which he uses his writing. Unlike the previous books that are connected to a fantasy type of children’s literature, those are more on the realistic type of literature of children because in this period the trend is towards realism in children’s book. There are some imaginary invented elements, but there are also important realistic elements. Besides that, during this period, we do have here and there some children’s books that have been successfully published abroad, that means, outside of the United States and outside the United Kingdom (two countries that came out with the 95% of children’s literature). We have a 5/10% of children’s books and picture books tradition from abroad that were successful. “Cuore” would also be one of the greatest examples of realistic children’s literature. “The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant” was initially written in French and was then translated in English and was adopted by United Kingdom. If children’s literature, in general, had entered a Golden Age after the Second World War, then we can say the same thing regarding picture books. After the end of the war, there was the need to keep publishing costs as low as possible. There is the baby boom, and the economic situation slowly got better, but at the same time books could not cost too much because people couldn’t spend too much. There was the attention to keeping the costs as low as possible, and that meant that many picture books were printed on poor-quality paper. In picture book there was the desire to escape from reality and from what had been seen until there, and there is a neoromantic movement. Everything from picture book in this period is romanticized: it is not handled in a realistic way, but in a romantic way. We need to imagine the impact that the Second World War had on countries such as Britain. Britain more than in the United States because the United States participated in WWII but they were distant, it didn’t happen in their own country, so the troubles through which the United States went were very different from the struggles and the troubles that the British people went experienced. The writers in the United Kingdom definitely had a different style, especially in children’s books. They tended to depict landscapes more than anything else in a very romantic way. You could see the landscapes in this post-war British children’s books. Britishness was celebrated in every possible way (parades, flags, seen as often as possible) as well as countryside. THE GRAMMAR OF PICTURE BOOKS Picture books are different from illustrated books because with illustrated books there are two elements, that are the textual and visual elements, and those two things are independent from the other (and even if one of the two parts is removed, the other part still works well on its own), while in a picture book the visual and linguistic elements complete each other. The unique character of picture books is based on two levels of communication: picture books communicate by meeting two separate sets of signs, the iconic sign and the conventional sign. The iconic representational sign is a type of sign in which the signifier and the signified are related. If a person sees a symbol of a printer, the person can call that symbol an icon, and what it signifies is the printer. The person just needs to look at the icon and understand what it is referring two (the physical qualities of the printer are there). A conventional sign is different, so there is a signifier, so all those letters that are put together to produce the word “printer” ( p r i n t e r ). In semiotics it is considered a conventional sign, that tell what those words mean. There is no need a special knowledge to understand icons, but there is the need of a kind of knowledge to understand a conventional sign (knowledge of a language, and in another language the signifier is going to be different, it must be known what letters stand for, and the person needs to be able to put letters together, and to produce and read words). The same thing works with gestures. Picture books are complex iconic signs, and words in picture books are complex conventional signs. The function of pictures is to describe or represent, the functional words are primary to narrate the story. Conventional signs are usually linear, and always go from left to right (or right to left, or from top to bottom depending on the language). Icon signs are not linear, and they don’t give direct instructions on how to read them. Children look at something as a whole and then look at the details of the image, and understand something in particular and go back to the whole picture. Consider two books that have become a classic in children’s literature, “The Tiger that came to Tea” and “How to hide a Lion”, that are connected. At a certain point in “How to hide a lion” there is a little girl who is reading a book, “The Tiger that came to Tea”. There is a reference to another very famous book, and if a child sees it, picks up the book and reads the story or has read the story and focuses on this little detail, the child makes a connection and is reminded of another popular story that the child knows, so is more and more involved in the story itself. If the text is like this, the reader will go back and forth between the image and the text. It is a continuous kind of concatenated understanding. Each new reading of the book creates a much deeper and better understanding of the entire story. This is probably also why children ask their parents to re-read the story all over again. Every time the child reads again the book, there is a new understanding of it. The attention is focused on new details, and the reader always gets something more. Adults lose the ability to read the books in the same exact way of children. Illustrations are regarded merely as a cooperative element. Adults concentrate on the text more than on the visuals, and the verbal element becomes more dominant. Approaches in CL picture books  Picture books as educational vehicles There is the study of picture books from a sociological point of view, from the language acquisition point of view, and they are important because they teach children how to socialize, they teach a language to children, they have a therapeutical effect on child readers and help them grow.  Picture books that have been studied as objects for art history Researchers focus on design and techniques, the art and the artistic elements, lines, shapes, space, contrast. They teach children how to address problems in general and talk about the artistic importance of picture books. Other researchers have focused on stylistics diversity and thematic, and prefer to show the amount of diversity that is seen in picture books, so represent how different illustrators work and what kind of technique they are utilizing. In this case, individual pictures that are taken out of context are seen, and are considered without their relationship with the narrative aspects of text. All those approaches don’t teach how picture books work, but just teach how they look like and how diverse picture books can be. Picture books are also studied from a literary approach, in this case researchers have concentrated on the themes that they found in the books, on the gender structures and elements of the books. They worked on the aesthetic narrative aspects, the way in which these books depict society. All of this is related to literature, but once again not on how picture books work. A good classification regarding the typology of picture books is provided by Gregersen: Exhibit book, that is a picture dictionary, there is no narrative, so there are very few words and there is no narration and story. Picture narrative, a book that is wordless or with very few words, but there is a story. The pictorial elements are much more prominent. Picture book, where there is a story and the visual elements and the text are equally important. Illustrated book, where the text can exist independently, so a text can have illustrations, but even if it doesn’t, the reader will still be going to be able to understand the story. After Gregersen came out with this picture book typology, there finally is Hallberg’s distinction between illustrated books and picture books. From this distinction comes the idea of iconotext, a picture book in which there are words and images becoming an inseparable entity, and both cooperate to create a message, and if one or the other is eliminated, the message is not understandable anymore. Those two extremes can be understood and can be visualized as a sort of continuum: on one end we see texts without pictures, and on the opposite part there are picture books without text (only images). Verbal narrative There is an illustrated story, so there is the same type of text, but different illustrators can illustrate the same text differently. In the “Harry Potter” books, Jim Case’s illustrations are not necessary there to make the book understandable, but they are a good decoration. The text doesn’t change, and the illustrations are not necessarily. Non narrative A poem that is accompanied by illustrations. It is technically a non-narrative kind of illustrated book. Here the text can be read afterwards. What is important is that poems can exist on their own, and don’t need the illustrations. Exhibit books Books with pictures and without words: no narrative. There are single words that may accompany the pictures, or not. English picture dictionary, in which there is no narrative, there is text-pictures correspondence. The visual corresponds directly to the visual elements Picture narrative Picture book that doesn’t utilize words at all, but only pictures. There isn’t always the need of words to tell stories, but author and illustrators can convey a plot only by using pictures, and the reader here can narrate the story. The child tells the story, changing it every time, only looking at the pictures. A wordless picture narrative is complicated because it demands that the reader/viewer can verbalize the story. “Red sled”, in which there are onomatopoeical words, that don’t help with the plot of the story. One animal is added to the book as the story proceeds. There is the progress from the biggest to the smallest animals. The child sees the paws in the snow and understands that a big animal has borrowed the slide. A child can understand the story easily, and the story is quite simple. in the United States. The illustrator ends up getting the text and creating the images. The writer is going to add as much information as possible hoping that the illustrator is going to illustrate as much as possible. There is an imperfect type of collaboration, but that is not the case when the author is also the illustrator. Complementary picture book In Beatrix Potter’s case, she was both the illustrator and the writer, and she was good at both tasks. The way that she created the text and images is what is intended as a “complementary picture book”. This is where the text and the pictures go hand in hand and fill up the gaps. The gaps that are found in the images are filled out by the text and the ones that are in the text are filled out by the images. There isn’t any overlap, but the images and the text work together and strengthen the meaning. The initial picture of the rabbits illustrates the rabbits as not dressed; they are just rabbits. In the second image, they are still rabbits, but there is a metamorphosis happening since they are humanized. There is a transformation. Mrs. Rabbit is talking to her children and is addressing them, there is something that happens every time in normal families: a mother advises her children not to do something, or else something bad will happen. There is a combination of back-shadowing, which means something in the story tells something in the past, and fore-shadowing, which indicates something that is going to happen. This appears both in the visual element and in the text. She refers to Mr. Rabbit’s accident, that was killed and eaten by humans (back-shadowing). In the visuals, there is an element that predicts that something is going to happen (fore-shadowing): the mother is talking to her children, but Peter Rabbit is turned around, is not listening at all and not paying attention to his mother. He is a character that doesn’t follow rules and advice. In the first picture, Peter Rabbit is the one that is hiding. The reader still doesn’t know what is happening in the future, but there is a shadow looming in the future, making the reader think that something bad is going to happen. Counterpointing picture book So far, the reader has remained passive, because all the information is provided by the images or the text or both. If it happens to see gaps in the visuals or the texts, there is always a tendency for readers to be passive in this case. As soon as the two elements start to contradict each other or provide alternative information, then there is a variety of readings and interpretations. Whenever the visuals and the text go in two separate ways or contradict each other, then there are “counterpointing picture books”. Rosie’s Walk (1968) Rosie the hen went for a walk across the yard around the pond over the haycock past the mill through the fence under the beehives and got back in time for dinner There are twenty-five words long sentences. The visual part is predominant. It is a counterpointing picture book because there is another story happening, and not the story that is described by the words. The story seems easy, it seems that nothing much is happening. But the pictures tell a completely different story because there is a fox trying to catch Rosie, and the hen doesn’t even notice what is happening. It is not a simple story. The visuals and texts go in opposite directions, and the reader will tend to put in words the story that is not in the text, providing the child with unnecessary information. Another example of counterpointing book is “Come Away from the Water, Shirley” (1977). On the left page there is a typical family interaction at the beach, addressing the child to do or not to do some things, but on the right part of the spread, something different happens. The child goes on a quest and find a treasure. There’s a dog, and pirates. The text is following parts of the pictures; the other parts of the visual elements are counterpointing each other. Everything in the text is contradicting something in the picture. There are two narratives, that are conflicting in their genres. One narrative is realistic, and the other part is fantastic. Even artistically the two narratives are clarified through the design and the style that the illustrator used to “distinguish” the two parts: the colours change, on the left side they are saturated and bright, but when there is an element of danger, there are darker elements. The left side is static, while on the right side everything happens. The child perceives that an entire day has passed, but on the other side, the parents are sitting down on a white background, not making the reader understand the passing of the day, but probably only a few hours have passed. Lily takes a Walk (1987) It is still a counterpointing picture book, but something else is happening. Lily likes to go for walks with her dog, Nicky. Sometimes they walk for hours and hours until the sun starts to slip down behind the hill. Even if it begins to get dark on the way home, Lily is never scared because Nicky is there with her. Today she does the shopping for her mother and then… she stops for a moment to look at the evening star. “Look, Nicky.” she says “That’s called the Dog Star.” As Lily walks past Mrs Hall’s window, she waves. Mrs Hall is always knitting. Bats flitter and swoop in the evening sky. “Aren’t they clever, Nicky?” says Lily. “Not far, now.” She stops by the bridge to say goodnight to the gulls and the ducks on the canal. Soon, she comes to the last corner. This is the best moment of all. She can see the light in her window and smell her supper cooking. Lily’s mother and father always like to hear what she has seen on her walk. Before long, it is time for bed. Nicky is already in his basket. “We had a good walk today, didn’t we?” says Lily. “Goodnight, Nicky. Sleep well.” The child was looking at the world from her point of view, but there is also someone else’s point of view, the dog’s, which lives a different experience through the walk.  A tree that “comes to life” and scarily smiles at the dog.  Garbage bin eating things.  A dark tunnel that “comes to life” and that also has two eyes.  The moon is one eye, the clock is the other, and the lamp is the nose.  Figure on a poster that comes to life.  She is not scared of the bats, but the dog is.  In the canal he sees creatures.  Strange animals come from the garbage bins. When she comes back home, she tells her parents what she saw throughout the day, but if the dog could say something, he would report a totally different narration. The bubbles indicate a recollection of what the dog has seen. This is a representation of what happens to children in the view of the relation between the child and the parents/adults. The dog represents what the child goes through every single day, and the child here acts as the parent. Most of the times parents don’t see the world the same way a child sees it. In the eyes of a child, everything is borderline between fantasy and reality. Like the dog, children don’t have the capacity to express with words what they see and experience, because they don’t have the ability to use words yet. Many times, adults read books together with the child. The child will be able to understand the double counterpointing narrative only when the child is able to read. But if a child doesn’t know how to read, then there is the need of an adult that experiences the book together with the child. Counterpointing narrative also refers directly to the adult. The child will pay attention to visual elements and is going to be able to look for details. The adult will experience the book trough the text, but an adult has unfortunately lost the ability of imagine. “Looking for Atlantis” (1993) by Colin Thompson is a perfect example of a book referring to a dual audience. There is the story of a child that stands at the bedside of his grandparents. His grandfather is an adventurer and wants his grandson to find something that he hid for him, going on an adventure and find the treasure, Atlantis. There is a child speaking about his grandfather. The child has a vivid imagination. The child will not read the story, but the adult will. In the mind of the adult, the adult will think that what is written is not realistic, since the adult lacks imagination. The grandfather is old and probably sick and is teaching his grandson something. There is a message for the child, that is that Atlantis is right here, all around you, you must look for it. He is pushing the child to use his imagination to go on a quest. The message for the adult is that even if the adult is reading the book for the child, and probably thinks that what is written is not real, the adult should believe otherwise and be less narrow-minded. The book is so beautiful for the number of details that are added to the text. Every tiny element matters. There are descriptions, that describe something that is not depicted in the picture. The words are figurative language, it is almost poetic. That works with children, especially if the text is read aloud to them. The reader is transported together with the small child in a forest with her father and the setting is described in a figurative type of way in the text. The book is in first person, so she is describing what she is doing. Visual descriptions on the contrary have unlimited possibilities. “Atlantis”: the text says “Beside the bed everything he had collected through his long life was packed into a large wooden chest”. That’s the only thing that the reader knows from the text, but from the visual there are lots of pieces of information. Every single element in the chest is important and carries information. The child and father go on a quest in the chest and go through this visual description with unlimited possibilities. A spectrum of pictorial solutions that range from no setting provided in the book, such as alphabet books, that only portray the letters of the alphabet and a related image. There is no story. On the other part of the spectrum, there is a fully depicted setting that may be predominantly visual, or mainly verbal, or a variety of combinations. “Lily takes a Walk”: pictures and text are parallel but go in different directions. The story is told from the point of view of the girl, while the visual elements follow the point of view of the dog, which depicts a totally different story. She explains the setting through words, but the setting described in the visual elements of the picture book is totally different (variety of combinations). In the simplest redundant way, pictures and words replicate each other. Everything that is described through words is depicted in the visual elements of the book. More frequently, the picture will expand what the text describes, or can go far beyond this so that the entire setting is visual. In some cases, the visual and textual elements may not be in harmony. This is what is defined as counterpoint (positive counterpoint since it is intended). Sometimes there may be a mismatch between what the author writes and what the illustrator presents, and that may happen because there’s no connection between them (non-intentionally). For many stories in which exists an historical dimension, the careful description of the setting is necessary and educational. The Scandinavian book “Tyra from Odengatan no.10” is defined to be an historical picture book and all the pictures that are seen are very detailed because today’s children have no idea about how life was in Scandinavia at the end of the century. The details of the setting can offer information about things that the child is not aware of. Those pieces of information are delivered through visual elements, so the child only has to look at the images and the details of the pictures. FRAMING Framing is a powerful way to communicate something, a powerful visual element of setting. Here in the example from “The Wolves in the Walls” by Dave McKean, there is framing only on the left. Frames do provide a sort of action and tell the reader the order in which to read the story. The eyes are forced to go from left to right and from up to down. It is just like cartoons or comics. When it comes to the relationship with the reader, the technique of framing brings the reader more far away from the scene. The one on the right, a full page, is much more intimate because there are no frames. On the left, the setting is created through framing. There are four different frames, that distance the reader from the story. Frames normally create a sense of detachment between the picture and the reader, while the absence of frames invites the reader into the picture. The double spread shows the buildup shock, everything is sudden and intimate. The setting is telling the reader that it is a scary story. Minimal or reduced setting This is a minimal or reduced setting, that began being popular after the Second World War, because at that time something that was called hyperrealism became in vogue and worked a lot with children. They are minimal in the type of information that is provided through the visual, and focus on the immediate surrounding of the child because those are the things that the child knows really well. “The King and the Sea”: a one-page long story. There is a very sketched man that the reader knows is a king because he is wearing a crown on his head, and there is water that is believed to be the sea. “The new Jumper” talks about an egg that feels like any other egg in form and shape. One day he decides that he is going to be different from anyone else by wearing a jumper. There is a sketch of an egg that is wearing something that resembles a jumper. The setting is familiar and ordinary and reflects the child’s limited experience of the world. The objects are isolated, with no background, with no other objects that suggest extra information. There is no historical or geographical information. The story is lifted from time and place. There are no boundaries of time and culture: everyone can understand the story without limitation. It never becomes old or outdated, and that is why they stay popular for decades without getting old. The Flat Rabbit There is a minimal kind of setting; it is a story that can take place anywhere anytime. This is a Scandinavian book, and it deals with a very hard topic, death, and the passing of someone. There are some themes that tend to be avoided in what is proposed to children, but death is a topic that can be proposed to children in a certain way. It is a story that begins with a carefree dog that is walking down the street. Suddenly, he comes upon a rabbit flattened on the road. The dog wonders what to do and his friend, a rat, comes by. The rabbit is dead, but the words “dead” or “death” do not appear in the story. The child understands what is going on and lives the experience of death through the characters that want to make the situation better. It is a very introspective type of story, that tells how the reader we can deal with death.  “June 10th 1928”, that is, his birthdate.  Birnkrant was a toy designer who was famous in that period and collected everything that was related to Mickey Mouse.  Fandango, which was another shop that the author really loved, and that contained antique things. He was friends with the owner of the shop. Eugene was his husband (homosexual). NARRATING WAR THROUGH PICTUREBOOKS I am invading Ukraine because it has always been Russian - Putin This is true. Ukraine is quite a recently independent country. Kyiv is historically considered the birthplace of the Russian empire and its population. Ukraine used to be a city-state until it was destroyed in the early XIV century by the Mongolian invasions, and then Ukraine was invaded by different countries. Ukraine is in the middle of the line between Europe and European Russia. Even the name “Ukraine” means “border territory”. Geographically, it is a country that must be crossed to go between Russia and the rest of Europe. It is in a strategic position because it is in the Baltic Sea and has important natural resources. In Italy it has been defined as “Il granaio della Russia e dell’Europa e degli Stati Uniti”. What is interesting is the fact that until 1991 Ukraine was part of the USSR. In 1991 Gorbachev dismembered the USSR, and Ukraine tasted freedom for the very first time. The narrative that is found in this country up until 1991 in children’s literature reflected the country, and its most important historical events or the social events. The books depicted a very simple life, there was the idea of the importance of family, but also the importance of the state, a country that provided everything that was needed. It is an ideology that does not want the individual in the spotlight, but the entire society. Everything was idyllic, even if in real life there were a lot of difficulties (food, clothes, that were not always granted and easy to have). Ukraine as an original territory was small, and only in the centuries that followed parts of different countries were given to Ukraine. The Russian tsars in 1654-1917 let territories be acquired by Ukraine (for example Lenin in 1922, with which Putin is not happy, and indeed has been saying that a lot of political figures over the centuries have made mistakes; or Stalin in 1939, as well in 1945). The First World War saw the end of the Austro-Hungarian empire, which was dismembered, and a lot of those territories were annexed to Ukraine. After WWII, it was all USSR, until 1991 when the USSR dismantled itself. There is the Baltic Republic. In 2014 there is the start of a clear conflict between Russia and Ukraine, and that’s because the majority of Ukrainians wanted to become even more European by entering NATO, asking to be assimilated by the European Union, and starting to break up with the Russian empire. These are the years that are interesting. There is the start of the tension in 2003 with the demonstrations that followed the former Ukrainian president Yanukovych’s refusal to sign an EU agreement. He was sent away, and then Ukraine started establishing its close connection with Europe. In retaliation for that, Russia annexed Crimea. In the same year, pro-Russian parties claimed the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic. There is also the Malaysian Plane Crash, which crashed because of that conflict, and therefore there is a no-flying zone over Ukraine and the Baltic Sea. In 2018 the US approved the sale of anti-tank weapons to Ukraine, in October Ukraine participated in the air exercise held by the US and NATO, and in 2019 Zelensky was elected and promised to retake the Donbas region. That’s when everything exploded. Between 2019 and 2021 everything was quiet because of Covid-19, and after that the conflict broke out. What interest today more than politics is the importance of language. If a Ukrainian is asked what Ukrainian language is, a Ukrainian will have difficulties pinpointing the language. Ukrainians are basically bilingual, and they either speak Russian or Ukrainian or a language that results in a mix of Russian and Ukrainian. They speak a different language depending on where they live, but they can all understand each other. There is little diversity between the two languages, but there is geographically a lot of diversity in the people that speak it. The Ukrainian speakers are found mostly in the western part of Ukraine, in the central part of the country a mixed language is mostly spoken, while in the right part of the country, Russian is spoken instead. This shows how the country is split in half, and how much Russian identity can still be found in Ukraine today. How can you fight when there is that kind of cultural mix? The official language of Ukraine is Ukrainian, but Russian is the native language of almost 30% of Ukraine’s population. The rest are speakers of other languages. There are 40 minority languages and dialects. Even when it comes to dialect and local dialect, they all come from the Soviet Union. In 2006-2007 a survey was conducted by Gallup concerning the use of the language, and 83% of the participants preferred to conduct the survey in Russian rather than Ukrainian. Today, looking at the Constitution of Ukraine, Article 10 states that the state has an obligation to ensure the comprehensive development and functioning of the Ukrainian language in all spheres of social life throughout Ukraine while guaranteeing the free development, use, and protection of the Russian language and other languages of national minorities of Ukraine. The Ukrainian language is favored, but the Russian language is protected. Why is Putin saying that one of the reasons to invade Ukraine was because Ukrainian people are fascists and because Russian people are suffering under Ukrainian politics? He thinks he can say that because in 2016 a new rule came into force in Ukraine saying that Ukraine’s radio stations had to play a quota of Ukrainian- languages songs each day. Since 2016 the Ukrainian language was started to be openly preferred rather than Russian. The law also required tv and radio broadcasters to ensure 60% of programs such as news and analyses are in Ukrainian. In September 2017 Ukraine instituted a similar policy on languages in public education. In 2017 the Ukrainian state decided that in education the Ukrainian language would be used, and the Russian language would be avoided in schools that did not require a second language. Since 2016 there have been numerous books for children in Ukraine that propose bilingualism. The same story is told in two different languages at the same time (Russian and Ukrainian, and sometimes even English, since Ukraine is a country that is trying to open up more towards the west). Another question is: what is the narrative that is going to be used, what are the themes that are going to be more frequently shown in books? Folktales display the elements that are expected of European tales, with distinctive Slavic variations, and there are myths and heroic legends that reveal the wars and clashes of people moving into and through this corridor between Asia and Europe. Ukraine has always experienced war and violence, and famine and difficulties, so all those elements are expected to show up in children’s books. This is a book by a modern Ukrainian poet, Olena Huseinova, and it is not only a book for children, but there are poetry and images working at the same time. MODULO B A text is any given stretch of speech or writing assumed to make a coherent whole (doesn’t necessarily have to be a whole page). There can be both minimal and maximal text. A source text is a text that requires a translation, a target text is a text which is a translation of the source text. A source language is the language in which the source text is spoken or written, while a target language is the language into which the source must be translated. A text can also be something oral. The word “translation” hasn’t been coined recently, but it is a word that has already appeared in the XIV century, and it means “to carry across”. “Translatio” means transporting. In context, it could mean the carrying across of a message or a text, carrying across geographical or cultural boundaries. This translation has also been defined as a process of communication that involves a sender and a receiver. Like any form of communication, the sender sends a message that is coded in a certain way by the receiver. Is this message always coded correctly? Not always. Most of the time the receiver code and decode continuously, and does that correctly when understanding the other person, but sometimes there is a misunderstanding in communication, and this is when the receiver doesn’t decode things correctly. Comprehension and interpretation are processes that everyone performs whenever listening or reading a piece of linguistically imparted information. There are a sender and a receiver, and there is the need to comprehend a message and interpret it; to decode or interpret the message there is the need for experiential baggage, so the receiver understands the other person based on how much the receiver knows the language and the cultural baggage that the receiver has. All those things come into play when decoding messages whether in the same language or from one language to another. The cultural differences between senders and receivers are complicated sometimes. At a certain point, the translator becomes a very important mediator (not only a language, but also a cultural mediator). It is the translator that utilizes background cultural knowledge to decode a text and render it comprehensible for people with another culture. However, there is always a certain amount of loss in the translation processes. No matter how well the translator knows the language, or culture, there is always going to be lost something in translation. Complete equivalency is not achievable. If translation is looked at from a cultural point of view, some words mean something else in different languages. What does it mean to translate in other countries? How is translation perceived? Translation is done differently depending on the culture and on the country. “Word for word” and “sense for sense” kind of translation. Cicero warned against translating “word for word”, and also meant that attention should not be put to every single word, but what is important is to carry across meaning. St. Jerome while translating the Bible into Latin said that the translator needed to translate not word for word but sense for sense. The translator should get more towards a sense per sense kind of information, what is important is that the meaning is carried across, and not translating every single word. Historically, other important figures in translation have also added elements that are recurring. For example, Eugene Nida in the 1960s highlighted the importance of context for a translator. He said that a language cannot be understood outside the total framework of the culture, of which the language in question is an integral part. He goes back to the idea of context and the importance of background knowledge. It is important to understand the context in which a translation is taken place. Still, in the 1960s a lot of attention was directed towards diverging from the source text and the amount of creativity that the translator could have. If the translator has to prefer a sense for sense kind of translation, it should be asked how much translators can diverge from the source text in creating a translated text, and how faithful they could be. How much a translator can diverge is connected to the idea of creativity, because the more the translator diverges from the source text, the more the translator is required to be creative. Some children’s books are hard to translate because they are written in poetry, so there are linguist elements that cannot be completely replicated in a language. At that point, the translator diverges, but also must become creative. Catford (1965) started to say that, if the translator could diverge a lot, and needed to be creative, then it must be recognized that there is something called linguistic untranslatability and cultural untranslatability.  Linguistic untranslatability occurs when there is no lexical or syntactical equivalent in the target language. One word that is found in the source language is not found in a target language, and at that time there is linguistical untranslatability.  Cultural untranslatability is when there is no equivalent situational feature in the source language The idea of bathroom changes from one culture to another. Another big figure in translation is Roman Jakobson, that wrote a very important essay entitled “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation” that came out firstly in 1959 and then in 2000, and what he had underlined is the different types of translations. - Interlingual translation: the reinterpretation of the language in another linguistic code. It involves two different languages, a source language, and a target language. - Intralingual translation: translation within a language that would involve in words of the same language. - Intersemiotic translation: translation from one linguist system to another which means the transference of meaning from a verbal to a non- verbal system or from one medium to another. It is a translation, but not between two languages, but it is a translation from one semiotic mode to another. An immediate intersemiotic translation is carried out with a street light: when it is red, it is known that there is the must to stop… An intralingual translation is something that is carried out all the time, all day long. An example of that is the following: there has been an accident, and the policeman says, “Stop the car: there’s been an accident ahead, Madam – I’m afraid you’ll have to turn left down…”. Jill thanks, and when Jack asks her what he said, Jill reports it. She is carrying out an intralingual translation because she is simply rephrasing and summarising what the policeman said. It is going to be seen how the translator can transfer from British English to American English in a book, and how the languages sometimes change. The focus is going to be put on the lexical choices, on the grammatical choices, and on the spelling choices that have been made. Sometimes these choices make life easy for the target readers, but the text is impoverished. When the character speaks, there is a lot of information regarding the character, because when a person speak, it can be understood where the person is from. The same works also in books, and in translation when the translator goes from one language to another, but even when the translator goes from a language variety to another language variety. In “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole”, the copy editor had to work understanding and changing the language. Some British terms are retained, but the spelling has been changed. In “Pony on a Porch” by Lucy Daniels, instead, the original voice speaks in a Yorkshire dialect, and that is done through the eye dialect, where it can be seen that the dialect is replicated in the written form by changing the spelling and recreating the original sounds of the actual dialect. How does an American audience perceive these messages? An adult doesn’t have a problem with it, because is aware that there are different varieties of the same language. Children are not aware of that, and since they come from another variety, they may not understand those words. All those cultural bumps have been eliminated, even within the same language. In “Pony on a Porch”, the elderly grandfather is given the occasional Americanism, in the British English text, for example, he describes a horse as a “great big fellow”, while in the American edition this turn of phrase becomes “a great big guy”. There is a problem. The book is levelled to the target audience, but at the same time, the story is changed without even noticing. If the characters change language, readers do not understand where the story is set. This also makes the characters less individual and vivid for the reader, even if they are more understandable. It introduces a note of conflict and inconsistency between what the character says and what the story tells about them. In “Flour Babies” by Anne Fine, the language is British English, and several British English expressions belong to a colloquial register, but the American English terms that are used in the translation are more neutral. The book tells the story of a group of problematic students in the United Kingdom with behavior problems, and that have been gathered in the same classroom. They all talk with a lot of slang words and sometimes even swear words. In British English, the term “to nick” was utilized, and was translated interlingually with “to steal”, or however American readers would not have understood. Not only do these changes influence the register, but they are also examples of semantic impoverishment. Here the inconsistency is the fact that there are children that are expected to speak with a not standard kind of English, but in the American version this isn’t there anymore, but everything has been standardised. These are examples of graphological deviation: it is utilized to recreate the sound of slang and dialect so that a certain type of language is associated with what the character said. It is often done, and it is useful. The copy editor needs to understand that when a book comes from overseas, some things should be changed because the book is going to be read by children that do not know what varieties are. The problem of translation started coming up in the 1950s and 1960s when it was determined how close language and culture were. The most important issue that came out was regarding meaning and equivalence. Over the 20 years that followed, many attempts were made to define the nature of equivalence: it was wanted to understand what equivalence was and if it could be somehow achieved. Nida’s concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence and the principle of equivalent effect in the late 1960s tried to answer that question, more than Jackobson’s issue of meaning and equivalence. There are words that signify something, but the relationship between the sign and the signifier is completely arbitrary. There are some symbols that put together the word “house”, but what it is thought about when hearing this word might change based on the place where the hearer live. Equivalence in meaning is important for a translator. In translation, there is the problem of translatability, achieving equivalence in meaning. It has been linked over the years to linguists relatively, determinism or universalism. Linguists were not the first ones to understand that there was something called “translatability” and “untranslatability”, equivalence in meaning or not. Anthropologists were the first ones that understood that there was something called cultural meaning, and that meaning was closely associated with language and different cultures. Languages and cultures are really and strongly tied one with the other, so culture cannot be excluded when talking about language and vice versa. Attitudinal meaning It is that part of the overall meaning of an expression which consists of some widespread attitude to the referent. The expression does not merely denote the referent in a neutral way, but also hints at some attitude to it. Associative meaning It is that part of the overall meaning of an expression which consists of expectations that are, rightly or wrongly, widely associated with the referent of the expression. This cause associative meaning to link to stereotypes. They operate creating prejudices and stereotypes. Allusive meaning It is when words that use or contain a suggestion rather than an explicit mention are utilized. This is supposed to be funny in Italian (c’è un contadino a cui sono scappati i cavalli, e quindi chiama il brigadiere). He doesn’t understand the allusion, and this makes it humor. “Bolt” has a double meaning (qualcosa che può essere avvitato, ma anche “corso via”). The problem is that it results in not being funny. Better, because there is also the use of an expression, “putting the cart before the horse” (mettere il carro davanti ai buoi). Il lavoro del traduttore consiste anche nel variare la lingua per rendere il tutto più capibile. Reflected meaning is the meaning given to an expression over and above its literal meaning by the fact that its form calls to mind the completely different meaning of an expression that sounds, or is spelled, the same, or nearly the same. A word just by the way that is written or pronounced, a meaning passes in mind. Collocative meaning is given to an expression over and above its literal meaning by the meaning of some other expression with which it collocates to form a commonly used phrase.  “September” is a month, but when associated with “11”, then it will reminds of the terroristic attack of the 11th September 2001. Affective meaning is an emotive effect worked on the addressee by the choice of expression, and which forms part of its overall meaning. The expression does not merely denote its referent, but also hints at some attitude of the speaker or writer to the addressee. Every day in language words might have a meaning that is understandable to only a part of the population. Different meanings can be attached to different words, and to really understand a text it is needed to look at the diverse meaning that each word can have, because the same kind of meaning has to be recreated in translation, or otherwise the text in translation will not have the same kind of impact. That is something that is called “the problem of achieving an equivalent fact”. Translators ask themselves “How important is the relationship between receptors and the message?” Nida in the 1960s said that the relation between receptor and text should be the same as the one that existed between the original receptors and the message. How is this to be achieved when the target text audience is far removed from the source context? It is the typical problem of translators when they deal with two very different cultures. How does the translator determine who the audience is and what the source text’s author’s intention was? This problem can be explicated by saying that equivalence or similarity in meaning between the source language and target language, and how to achieve it, are major concerns in translation. That’s something that it is always there in the back of minds when translators translate. Translators not only have to create a precise kind of translation, but also an equivalent one, and that sometimes is going to make a not so precise kind of translation, diverging a lot from the original text. Anton Popovic is a very famous linguist, who also worked a lot at the University of Michigan, and identifies four types of equivalences in translation: - Linguist equivalence: achieved when there are similarities between words of the source language and the target language, and this occurs typically in a “word-for-word” type of translation. - Paradigmatic equivalence: achieved when there are similarities between grammatical components, so when adjectives, for example, are utilized in the source text, and the same number of adjectives are utilized in the target text. The grammatical components are identical in the source language and in the target language in the source and in the target text. - Textual/syntagmatic equivalence: achieved when there are similarities in the structure and form of the text (there might be an introductory phrase followed by a certain amount of sentences, and then an ending with a number of references). - Stylistic equivalence: achieved when there are only similarities in the meaning or impact of the expressed text or message. The form, the grammatical component, and the words might be different, but what is achieved through a stylistic kind of equivalence is the impact and the similarities in meaning. In a literal translation, the literal meaning of the word is taken as straight from the dictionary, and that is out of context, but the grammar structure is respected. There is still a word-for-word translation, but at least the grammatical rules are respected. Because the target language grammar is respected, a literal translation often involves grammatical transpositions, so sometimes the grammatical units are going to be different from the original to the target text. Grammatically the example sentence works, but the equivalence in meaning is not achieved in this case with a literal translation, although it is grammatically correct. On the opposite side of the continuum there is a free kind of translation, in which there is only a global correspondence between the textual units of the source text and those of the target text. There is equivalence in meaning, although there is no equivalence in language. This is an example of communicative translation because in each situation the source text uses an expression that is standard for that situation, and the target text uses a target language expression for a target audience. An idiom that is utilized in Italy cannot be translated, so an equivalent one will be found. Can translation loss be avoided? No, because in translation something is going to lost anyway. The idea of translators is that the translator should not agonize over the loss, but should concentrate on reducing it, and on what to preserve from the original text. If translation loss is inevitable, the challenge of the translator to control it by deciding which features, in each source text, are the most important to respect, and which can most legitimately be sacrificed in respecting them. Translators can chose what information can be eliminated, and what can on the other side be preserved. Cultural transposition is when translator translates from one to another culture. Baker has worked a lot on cultural transposition and cultural translation, and says that a translator may decide to omit or replace whole stretches of text which violate the reader’s expectations on how a taboo subject should be handled. It is not only a matter of achieving equivalence in translation, but also avoiding problems for target readers and culture. Therefore, the translator can decide to omit, change, or eliminate them. “Macelli specializzati” It was fine back then to talk about those: people worked with leather a lot, and people know where leather comes from and what the process is. People are not scandalized to read this word. In other cultures, and in particular for Anglo-Saxon countries, the fact that “slaughter-houses” are mentioned, a taboo subject. It negatively affects the reader. It is going to be a cultural element that the translator must pay attention to. The first translator that worked on the label for an English audience came up with the translation that is here seen. The translator decides to translate “macelli specializzati” as “slaughter-houses” and by that people manage to pick up all the harshness of the word.  “Complimenti” is translated as “compliments”, and this is a big mistake: it is a false friend, it doesn’t mean “complimenti”  “Ha scelto” is translated as “chosed”, and this is a grammar mistake.  “Realized” is wrong, it is supposed to be “made”.  “Materials of high quality” should be translated as “high quality materials”.  “After different proceeding of manufacture” should be translated as “manufacture processes”.  “Softier” is wrong, it should be “softer”. “Blackpool” is a cultural problem. In Italian the brand name was “Blackpool”: if it sounds foreign, then it sounds fancier. In the United Kingdom or in the United States, products tend to be commercialized with an Italian name, because it is fancier and it sells better. Blackpool in the United Kingdom has bad associations, it is a real place in the United Kingdom, a cheap seaside place. The idea of high fashion is destroyed when Blackpool is associated. In the Italian version, the text gives the idea of tradition (a shoe that is made following traditional processes), while in the English translation the term “executed” related to “slaughter-houses” create a negative connotation. “Vecchi ciabattini” is “the old cobbler”. Cultural borrowing means to transfer a source text expression verbatim into the target text. It introduces a foreign element into the target text. Something foreign is exotic but cultural borrowing is different from exoticism because it does not involve adaptation of the source language expression into target language forms. It borrows a word that has cultural meaning in a country, hoping that it is going to work also in another language and culture. A communicative translation is usually adopted for all those clichés, idioms, proverbs, etc. which have readily identifiable communicative equivalents in the target language. It is important to recreate the impact in another language, to achieve meaning at all costs, even if it means to re-write the text all together. Sometimes, however, the obvious communicative equivalent will not be appropriate in the context. At the other extreme of the scale is cultural transplantation. The complete transplanting of the entire setting of the social language, resulting in the entire text being completely rewritten in a target-culture setting. A RECAP EXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE IN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE Expressive language is a type of language that determines that the language of children’s books is different from the language of an adult book. There are certain elements that reoccur repeatedly. Looking closer at the language, there is a type of language that is called expressive because it provides an extra layer of meaning for readers. - Idioms: are important in children’s literature because are utilized very often and because they carry a non-literal meaning. Whatever is said to children, they take things always literary, even fantastic things because they are not aware of the border between reality and fantasy. When there is a language that should not be taken as literary, at that point there are idioms. Are children able to understand them or do they take them literary? o “It is raining cats and dogs”  a child is going to take it literary, at least at the beginning, and the child is indeed going to picture dogs and cats falling from the sky until someone tells them that cats and dogs can’t fall from the sky, but that sentence means something else. - Name: can be a name of a person or place, especially if used to characterize or define the person or place. If there is the name “Voldemort”, there is an extra layer of meaning: the reader sees the word “morte”, “death”, and so the child understands that he is not a good character. “Nevile Longbottom” is translated in Italian as “Neville Paciock”, because at the beginning the character was cute, puffy and chubby, and the name “Paciock” resembles the characteristics of the character (the Italian translator decided to add a further layer of meaning, and became an example of expressive language in Italian, but not in English). “Harry Potter” is also expressive language in a way, because from the name the reader gets further information regarding the name: he sounds English, so he is probably either British or American, he is a foreign language, and it is a boy. At the same time, an Italian name such as “Filomena” or “Mafalda” gives the idea of an older lady. “Expressive language” is literally extra information that is gathered from the text. - Neologism: new words or pre-existing words utilized in a new way, or words that are given a new kind of definition. Roald Dahl uses a lot of neologisms, that is, new invented words or words that are utilized in a different way. - Allusions or intertextual material: references to pre-existing objects. - Wordplay and puns: turn of phrase that uses a different meaning than one would at first assume. - Dialect and slang: a kind of language used in a specific location by a specific group. Epstein is the one that managed to do something like this since she specialized in a methodology to translate for children. - Deletion: eliminating the problem altogether. It means to remove the expressive language and/or its associations, this may be part of a larger strategy of abridgment or adaptation, and may not be because of the expressive language itself, although it could be. - Compensation: to employ the expressive language, but in different places/amounts than the source text. It goes together with deletion. - Standardization: standardize the language using standard spelling, grammar, and word choices in place of the non-standard ones in the original. - Replacement: replace the expressive language with another example of the same sort of expressive language, or some other literary device or form of expressive language, or with a non-figurative word. - Addition: when new expressive language and/or new associations and/or some other texts are added where there was none before; this can be a way of compensating for deletion, adaptation, or replacement. This is where the translator is becoming creative because adds elements to the translated text. Therefore, addition and compensation work together. - Explanation: add explanation paratextually (a footnote or endnote, introduction or translator’s note, or a signal) or intratextually (a word or phrase in the text). The author is introducing a sophisticated word and explains what the word means. - Grammatical representation: to use non-standard grammar to mark the language usage. - Orthographic representation: to use non-standard spelling to mark the language usage. - Vocabulary representation: we have a non-standard word choice to mark the language use. - Literal translation: to recreate the expressive language in the target language, usually without the same connotations. - Adaptation: use of the expressive language but change the spelling or grammar or some other part of it, perhaps to better suit the target language. - Retention: to keep the expressive language and its associations, or to only retain the associations or ideas contained in the item of expressive language. Baker suggests that any expression that seems to work against reality, that appears to have odd grammar, and/or that starts with “like” might be an idiom. The more difficult an expression is to understand and the less sense it makes in each context, the more likely a translator will recognize it as an idiom. It is however hard for a translator to recognize an idiom. Once the translator has ascertained that there is an idiom in the text, the translator must consider how the idiom works in the text, and also what is it used for. If there is no use for it, if it doesn’t have any relevance to the text, then why bother translating it. Is it necessary? Is it telling me something in the story that is needed to be kept? A Serie of Unlucky Events  “you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar”. The character reads a lot and uses a lot of proverbs. Snicket, the author, also provides an explanation to the child, so the proverb is just a fancy way to say that a person is more likely to get what the person wants by acting in a sweet way, like honey, rather than in a distasteful way, like vinegar. In the translation is the expressive text lost or not? Inventeremmo un proverbio che in italiano non esiste ma che suona come tale, e i bambini potrebbero capirlo senza la spiegazione, che viene però aggiunta successivamente (traduzione letterale della spiegazione), e alla fine niente è stato perso. È un proverbio abbastanza semplice da capire, abbastanza trasparente. Se lo si tiene così come è sembra un proverbio. The idiom needs to be analysed, the translator is going to understand why the author used the idiom and what purpose it serves in the text. Is it necessary for the story? Then, the translator considers the role of idioms in the source and target cultures, especially from the perspective of children. The translator needs to think about how the source and target cultures employ idioms. If the translator is translating or re-translating a book, the translator needs to look at previous translations or look at how these idioms were translated in other books.  Literal translation: to translate the idiom/proverb literally, possibly ignoring the metaphorical meanings or non-literal and/or non-idiomatic usages.  Explanation: add an explanation of the idiom.  Retention: to retain an idiom/proverb directly, usually only if it is in a language foreign to both the source and the target cultures.  Replacement: to replace/translate an idiom/proverb with one from the target language, even if the meanings and/or forms are not the same.  Deletion: to remove an idiom/proverb completely; this may be part of a larger strategy of adaptation or abridgment.  Compensation: to add idiomatic language elsewhere in the text. He feels not like a child, but like a young adult, so he underlines that he is not writing a diary, but he is writing a journal, and he then explains that he only agreed to write in one for when he’s rich and famous. From these few words the reader understands that he is probably a kid that is 11-12 years old, not a very popular kid, and he typically feels out of place. Idiomatic language: “spill the beans”, “go for it”. In the translation, there is something far from the original. The translator has used standardization. There is translation loss because the original expressive language has been eliminated. It tells something about the character, but it is delated in the Italian version of the book. “Geniale” is not even something that is usually used. The translator is trying to compensate the translation loss. Idiom: “a piece of cake”, translated with “gioco da ragazzi”. Here the strategy that is used is replacement, so the idiom is replaced with an idiom that exists in Italian. Closely attached to cultural meaning. Food is often represented as an object of desire which may even have some magical features for the child reader, especially comfort foods, so food that children really know. Some of the most traditional and national dishes – for example, pizza for Italy or sushi for Japan – are quite well-known to any child, while others necessarily require the search for an equivalent in the target culture to have the same impact on the original on the child’s taste buds. Units of measurement and currency also fall under the category of titles, and according to Klingberg, cultural context adaptations often result in poor translation, however, they are necessary when children might otherwise fail to understand the meaning of the message. Source language forms can be kept in the target text when the reader is expected to be familiar with them. Normally in an adult novel, units of measurement and currency would not be translated, because an adult realizes that the story is set in another country, the author is foreign, so it is not difficult for an adult to understand them. Here the translator is working for children, and children may have never heard of foreign units of measurement and currencies. In children’s literature, units of measurement and currency are translated to make the message understandable, even if it clashes sometimes with the story. The author has translated the units of measurement and currencies, but in the Italian translation, there is loss, because here there is the standardization of the forms that Greg, a teenager that uses slang forms, uses. The dollar form is kept because children are familiar with it (there is the dollar sign in the “Mickey Mouse” serie). Even small children have no problem dealing with that symbol. Formally incorrect translations of the unit of measurement can be acceptable, since their main goal is to make the message understandable, not to be precise. All the titles in the series have been translated almost literary from Italian into English. This is a product that was born in Italy, and that was translated also for abroad. The series was so famous that the graphic version of it was proposed not in Italy since it is only found abroad. Elisabetta Adami, the author, was qualified abroad. Proper names are studied in the field of linguistics called onomatology and are formally divided into two subcategories called: - Anthroponym: names of person, things, animals. - Toponyms: names of places. The main function of names is to identify a unique referent (monoreferential). In literature, these monoreferential names almost always carry an extra kind of meaning. Therefore these names are in the category of “expressive elements in language”. It is interesting to see how they are translated. The names utilized in the “Harry Potter” books are always monoreferential and almost always expressive. “Neville Paciock” is translated this way because of the way the character was described in the beginning: a chubby insecure kid. It delivers more information, an extra kind of meaning.  Geronimo Stilton  a brainy mouse, editor of “The Rodent’s Gazette”. Although his origins are Italian, he doesn’t seem to be an Italian mouse at all, but almost looks like an English gentleman. He sounds Italian, but his name is not a famous Italian name.  Tea Stilton  Geronimo’s sister and special correspondent at the “Rodent’s Gazette”. In Italian she is “Tea” Stilton, while in English “Tea” would have been related to the drink, so it is changed into “Thea”, changing the spelling. The transliteral strategy that is utilized is adaptation.  Benjamin Stilton  a sweet and loving nine-year.old mouse, Geronimo’s favourite nephew. His name is foreign.  Trappola Stilton  Trap Stilton, proceeding with a literal translation.  Patty Spring  Petunia Pretty Paws. She is very cool, and everyone loves her. It is an interesting name for young Italian readers, because it sounds foreign and there are also alliterations that are also delivered in the English version of her name.  Pandora Woz (Polpetta)  Bugsy Wugsy (Little Tornado). She is not that pretty, but she is very funny. Bugsy Wugsy with an alliteration sound that makes the name very interesting and funny. Little Tornado, representing her character. There is creativity used in translation. It is a funny name and is cute, children will love the character just by hearing his name. From a sound point of view, it is not as interesting, but it is difficult to recreate alliteration in another language while keeping the same expressive kind of meaning. There is a bit of translation loss here.  If something reeks, it means that it tastes and smells bad. The idea is recreated. It is probably not as funny as the original language, but everything is here recreated. “Tanfotto” is however not the same as “Richard”, even if it works because it helps with the alliteration and is more familiar to English- speaking children. There is replacement. Here the translator really worked hard. Almost always there’s replacement, and the text in Italian sounds better, because the Italian author has played with the language regarding toponyms and names of places. There are always two words reoccurring: “topi”, “ratti”. “Oceano Rattico Meridionale” reminds of a real place, “Via del Borgoratto” isn’t a real street, but it sounds like one. “Tortellino” is easily recognised by Italian readers. o New Mouse city  New York City o Mouse Island  State Island o Ratlantic Ocean  Atlantic Ocean o Mousefort Lane 8 o Swiss Cheese Center 17 (English readers are not familiar with “tortellini”, but they are familiar with Swiss cheese).  17  scaramantic, so the number is changed. “13” is a negative number in the United States, so it is changed.