Strategies For English-Chinese Translation Of Children's Literature

Children's literature has a significant effect on children as it creates for them a fantastic spiritual world where they can not only enjoy themselves but learn some knowledge. CL translation plays an important part in accelerating the development of CL by realizing the communication of CL works all over the world.However, being one branch of literature translation, translation of children's literature doesn't obtain the attention it deserves. There's an improper imbalance between translation practice in CL and its theoretical study. In the aspect of practice, despite that countless works of CL have been imported to China, their quality is not satisfactory enough on a whole, since problems like adaptations and adult languages are not unusual. As for the theoretical study of CL, it is far backward. So far, study in this field has not been carried out in a systematic way, even no single book concerning CL translation is available in the market. Although there are several articles and theses published, the opinions are mostly based on the authors' personal experience or study of certain aspects, which are not thoughtful enough and hard to direct practice.The poor quality of CL translations and the undeveloped theoretical study on CL cry for in-depth study on CL translation. Based on the original text, this paper aims at probing into effective strategies to help CL translation practice, by analyzing examples from classic works as well as child readers' characteristics, with the hope to arouse attention from other scholars and researchers.Basic knowledge on children's literature, such as definition, classification, marks of quality, and language of CL, will be presented first with the purpose to help a translator to select a good work of CL. Then psychological characteristics and language ability of children at various age phases will be analyzed, which is very useful for the translator to determine the expression way he had better choose later in translation.To the phenomenon that adaptations are freely employed in CL translation, a complete translation is preferred to guarantee the translator successfully finish the task of meaning transference and to deliver children what the original work can. With regard to the language difference between adults and children, the basic vocabulary of children is recommended to build, with which a translator would not go too far away from his readers.In the whole process of CL translation, sticking to the original text is the most important principle, which should be borne in mind by the translator all the time. Free translation is suggested to be a major method in translation of CL works to make the language conform to the norms of the target language, which should be accurate, concise, vivid and musical. To meet this requirement, detailed strategies are put forward respectively. By the analysis of examples, the author claims that, judging meaning by the context of the original work is effective to ensure the accuracy of language; dealing with a long and difficult sentence by cutting it into curt clauses with logic is helpful to make language concise; employing rhetoric devices can produce vivid effect; utilizing rhythm, rhyme and onomatopoeia can make language sound musical.When cultural information especially cultural difference is concerned, the "Foreignization first, domestication second" strategy is encouraged to avoid the loss of cultural message and provide child readers with knowledge and emotional experience of the foreign environment and culture.