Reflecting upon children's literature based on translation and adaptation

Abstract

Through oral literature or TV/books storytelling, centenary children’s literature stories that have lasted through translation and adaptation are experiencced. Those texts are originally from different cultural contexts and come to present days by interpretations which keep the texts alive and amplify their comprehension possibilities. This paper aims at relating translation, adaptation and children’s literature, seeking to reflect upon how the knowledge about translation and adaptation may be useful to think about children’s literature classic tales. As a conceptual research (Williams; Chesterman, 2009), these are the main authors and their discussion areas considered as theoretical background: Jakobson (2012), Bassnett (2002), Plaza (2003) and House (2013) on translation; Katan (1999), Laraia (2001), Bassnett (2002) and Santos (2010) on culture; Hutcheon (2013) and Ribas (2014) on adaptation; and Lajolo and Zilberman (2007), Silva (2009) and Macêdo (2019) on a brief discussion about children’s literature route, including classic tales adaptations. As conclusion, reflecting upon children’s literature, especially classic tales, based on translation and adaptation, considering linguistic, aesthetic and cultural aspects, may be an enlightening resource to understand how these texts are reinterpreted in new contexts, valuing the genre and opening space for the narratives already known by the general public to be reconstructed in new cultures in different times, and valuing translation and adaptation to be considered independent from the source text from a perspective that considers new audiences and contexts.