The Inspirations Of Piaget’s Theory Of Cognitive Development On Children’s Literature Translation

Children’s Literature has a relatively long history in Europe where it matured in18th and19th century. The renowned classic Children’s Literature works, Grimm’s Fairytale and HansChristian Andersen’s Fairytale also came from this area. While, the history of Children’sLiterature in China is relatively short. China began to translate and introduce foreign Children’sLiterature works at the end of19th century, but the target readers of those translation versionswere not children because those Chinese versions carry obvious political purposes. After The MayFourth Movement, translators began to translate Children’s Literature works for children andmany Children’s Literature works appeared in the book market. Even some famous writers likeMao Dun, Lun Xun and Zhao Yuanren translated some Children’s Literature works. Nevertheless,at that time, no one did exclusive researches on Children’s Literature Translation. Since the reformand opening up, children’s book market has prospered. The translation versions of Children’sLiterature works occupied a large share, which even surpassed the indigenous ones and exertedgreat influence on Chinese children generation by generation. However, the translation ofChildren’s Literature works has some problems such as overflow of the translation versions of thesame book, the coexistence of the versions with good quality and the ones with poor quality, andthe low pertinence. These problems have negative impacts on children, their parents, translatorsand publishing houses in a direct or indirect way.Nowadays, the majority of those papers only focus on discussing the related translation skillsfrom the perspective of readers-orientation, functional approach and Skopostheorie, emphasizingthe differences between the Children’s Literature and adults’ literature. Though those researchesdid have some guiding effects on the translation of Children’s Literature works, they are still notwell targeted because differences existing in the children of different age groups were ignored.Then, This thesis adopted the interdisciplinary approach, combining Piaget’s Cognitive Theoryof Development with Children’s Literature Translation and concluded some well-targetedtranslation strategies. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development divides children’s cognitivedevelopment course into four stages, sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concreteoperational Stage,formal operational stage. Children of different stages have different features and according to those features, different translation strategies were concluded. Those strategies wereapplied to the analysis of four Chinese versions of The Little Prince, and through the analysis,translation strategies were rectified and supplemented, and in the end, an improved chart oftranslation strategies was presented.In conclusion, although Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development is adopted as the entrypoint to get the targeted translation strategies, the obtaining of the translation strategies are notonly based on the Theory of Cognitive Development but also the analysis of the translation case.