Register And Translation Of Children’s Literature

The source text of the translation is The Birds’Christmas Carol by Kate Douglas Wiggin. In this story, Carol, who was born on a Christmas morning, organized a Christmas celebration by herself for the children from the neighboring Ruggles family. This story vividly depicts how Carol and the Ruggles children prepared for the celebration, and how the celebration went and ended.The commentary part based on the present author’s translation of The Birds’ Christmas Carol explores, from the perspective of J. C. Catford’s register theory, several strategies of translating children’s literature. The author classifies the different registers presented in the source text into three groups in terms of age, social status and education background, and social roles. Under each group, the author selects representative examples from the source text for detailed analysis. It is concluded that the register differences are presented in the source text mainly through vocabulary and grammar. Therefore, translators should first judge the exact register the sentence belongs to, and then decide what translation strategies to use. Since the supposed target readers are children, the source text should be translated in such a way that children can understand and accept it, and the humorous and funny part in the source text should be sustained in the translated text at its best. To achieve that, translators can add suitable modal particles and punctuations, and divide sentences into separate sub-sentences when necessary.