The Translation Of Children’s Literature

The Berenstain Bears series, created by the husband and wife team of Stan and JanBerenstain over half a century ago, turn out to be one of the best children’s literary works.Since it was introduced to China, it has brought a reading fever among children and theirparents. Children’s literature is generally seen as a peripheral and uninteresting object ofstudy although it plays a manifold role as an educational, social and ideological instrument. Inaddition to being entertainment and a tool to develop children’s reading skills, it is alsohelpful to convey world knowledge, ideas, values, and accepted behaviour. But for so manyyears the study of children’s literature translation has been neglected and stayed in the edge ofthe academic field.Nord’s function plus loyalty theory was put forward in the1970s; it is a supplement andimprovement of functionalist approaches. Functionalist approaches give definition totranslation as a purposeful intercultural activity and state that the linguistic form of the targettext is decided by the purpose it is going to fulfill. Loyalty refers to the interpersonalrelationship between the original author, the translator, the target-text reader, and the initiatorof the translation action. Nord hoped to erase the limitations found in radical functionalismand solve the problem which concerns the relationship between the source-text author and thetranslator by introducing the loyalty principle into the functionalist model. The function plusloyalty of Nord works as a balanced theory between the Skopos rule and loyalty rule, and thecombination of these two rules make an improvement of the functionalist approaches.Under the framework of Nord’s function plus loyalty theory, this thesis is intended toinvestigate the Chinese translation of children’s literature with The Berenstain Bears series asa case. By studying the case, it is found that the language in the Chinese translation ischaracterized by vividness, conciseness and musicality, which increase the readability ofchildren’s literature and attraction to the readers. The translators of The Berenstain Bearsseries used literal translation and free translation respectively, which fulfill thereader-centered translation purpose from the function’s point of view; they also usedforeignization and domestication to keep loyal to the original writer and the target readers.However, some problems such as mistranslation, improper collocation and translationese arefound in the Chinese translation as well, which somewhat affect the loyalty to the originalwriter and the initiator of the translation, and call for improvement.To sum up, this thesis presents a tentative research on translation of children’s literature.Hopefully it may be helpful for further researches on the children’s literature translation andthe application of the theory of function plus loyalty.