On Children’s Literature Translation

Nowadays, children’s literature is no longer just a kind of reading material and it,to some extent, gradually becomes a medium to communicate among children. Moreand more excellent books for children from all over the world have been created, whichenhances the communication among children and narrows down their distance.However, because of the differences in language, there always exist obstacles forchildren to read. Thus, translation becomes vitally important in sharing children’sliterature from other countries. Lots of scholars do researches on the translation ofchildren’s literature. Childhood can be divided into several periods and children’sreading abilities are quite different in each period due to their different cognitive andpsychological developments. Thus, it is of vital importance for translators to have aclear purpose on which period readers the works are translated for so that they cantranslate children’s literature work with high value according to children’scharacteristics in different periods.The thesis firstly introduces Piaget’s cognitive stage theory. According to Piaget,there are four major periods during children’s cognitive development: the sensorimotorstage (birth to2years), the preoperational stage (2to7years), the stage of concreteoperations (7to11years), and the stage of formal operations (11years and beyond).Piaget points out any stage can not skip the former one, because each successive stagebegins after the accomplishments of previous stages. Children have their own cognitivefeatures in each cognitive stage. Therefore, translators must take children’s specialcognitive features into consideration when doing translation works for them.Then the author chooses a famous children’s novel, Harry Potter and thephilosopher’s stone as the case study material. The Harry Potter series enjoys a great popularity all round the world. It can not be imagined that the books have been soldmore than million copies since it was published. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is agreat success in the field of children’s literature. The phenomenon of Harry Potter likesa hurricane caused heated discussions among many research fields. Based on children’scognitive development theory, the thesis takes lots of examples from the two Chineseversions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone to compare with the originalversion so as to make a comparative research. It firstly analyzes the choice of words andsentences, including discussions on vividness, rhythm and rhyme, and colloquialism.Then it explores the translation of some main rhetorical devices in the book, includinghyperbole, simile, and metaphor. At last it deals with the translation of names whichconsist of the names of people, the names of spells, and the names of places.After the comparative study, some suggestions are provided in the hope that theywould shed light on the criteria of children’s literature translation. At last the authormakes a summary and conclusion of the thesis, pointing out that children’s literaturetranslation must put children in the center and take into consideration children’scognitive development and reception.