On Translation Of Cultural Elements In Children's Literature

In the seventeenth century in Europe, children began to be considered independent identities in society with their own characteristics, interests, and needs. Children's literature emerged and developed along with people's perception of children. In China, proper recognition to children was achieved at the beginning of 20th century. From then on, a large amount of children's literature was translated into Chinese , which accelerated the development of children's literature in China. Those classic foreign children's literary works have entertained and instructed Chinese children from generation to generation since then. There are rich cultural elements in foreign children's literature and the translation of them is of great importance in respect of children's understanding and target text's contextual effect.In this thesis, the author confines children to those from 6 to 12, who are usually in elementary school. Their reading ability is improving. They are acquiring more and more social and cultural knowledge. In the present cultural globalization, they encounter new exotic aspects of different cultures from time to time. Foreign cultures are no longer strange to them. The author will analyze various factors influencing selection of translation strategies for cultural elements and attempt to draw the following conclusion: in the present cultural globalization, a translator of children's literature is supposed to retain the cultural elements in the source text as much as possible to conform to the time of cultural globalization and contemporary children's characteristics. At the same time the translation must not go beyond children's capacity. In other words, nowadays, a translator is supposed to adopt mainly foreignization strategy supplemented by domestication, neutralization and omission when translating cultural elements in children's literature.Basing on the forgoing analysis, the author integrates relevance theory with translation to propose that when adopting mainly foreignization strategy supplemented by domestication, neutralization and omission, the translator should take Chinese children's cognitive environment into account and try to make them obtain a maximum contextual effect with minimum processing effort. On the basis of the above principle, the author makes a comparative study of four Chinese versions of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, then the author finds out how to select an appropriate translation strategy for a certain cultural element according to contextual effect and processing effort.