Translation Of Children’s Literature Guided By The Principle Of Child-Orientation—A Translation Report On The Boy Who Knew Everything(Excerpt)

This report selected Chapter 7 to Chapter 11 from The Boy Who Knew Everything(Forester,2015)as the source text.Under the guidance of the principle of child-orientation,the translator categorized the translation difficulties at the lexical,syntactic and discourse levels.By writing this report,the translator wants to enrich this principle and hopes to attract more people’s attention to apply this principle in translating children’s literature.The principle of child-orientation is appropriate to guide the translation of children’s literature as it can reach readers’ expectations.For one thing,the main target readers of children’s literature are from 6 to 12 years old(Xu,2004:33),meanwhile,this principle emphasizes on children’s aesthetic preferences,cognitive abilities and reading habits.The translation of children literary works is expected to respect the characteristics and special needs of children.This principle has been earnestly observed and simple expressions have been employed so as to cater to children’s limited understanding abilities,emotional needs and aesthetic preferences.For another thing,the translation difficulties like colloquial words at the lexical level,rhetorical devices at the syntactical level and long and complicated sentences at the discourse level have been handled under the theoretical guidance of the principle of child-orientation.The translator has adopted the strategies of conversion to change the part of speech of the words,substitution to replace the obscure words and amplification to complement the meaning at the lexical level.At the syntactical level,the translator has segmented the complex sentences into several short clauses.The translator has also applied the strategy of restructuring to handle the sentences with rhetorical devices to make the children experience the beauty of rhetoric.The findings of this translation report indicate two implications.Theoretically,the principle of child-orientation is like the helmsman in guiding the translator to understand the selected chapters of the children’s literary work completely and thoroughly.Practically,guided by the principle of child-orientation,the author has adopted such translation strategies as conversion,restructuring and segmentation to effectively tackle the translation difficulties,with correctness,effectiveness,cohesion and coherence achieved at the lexical,syntactical and discourse levels.