Translating Children’s Literature: The Rhyming Rabbit (2011) by Julia Donaldson

From the moment of birth, children are exposed to a plethora of children’s literature. Many of these books are typically lullabies, fairy tales, and nursery rhymes, which are frequently read aloud by adults and are generally in the format of picturebooks. This widespread use of literature for children has led to the status of children’s literature as one of the most developed and popular literary fields globally, representing a significant proportion of today’s publishing landscape. Children’s literature plays a prominent role in the lives of children, serving as a gateway to the world of reading and literature. Furthermore, it constitutes a pedagogical and didactic tool for children, facilitating their education, the development of cognitive and learning skills, and thus shaping their future. Nevertheless, the field of children’s literature has historically been regarded as a marginalised area of study among scholars, due to the perception that it is less important and less complex than the other forms of literature. The present thesis focuses on the field of children’s literature and its role in the field of translation, with the objective of disproving the aforementioned mistaken beliefs, and highlighting its pivotal role in children’s lives, as well as its complexity as a type of literature. Moreover, this thesis aims to emphasise the necessity of translation in children’s literature, especially in the context of today’s multicultural society, where the demand for overcoming linguistic and cultural differences between countries is continuously growing. In order to successfully achieve this skopos, the thesis has been structured into five chapters. The first three are highly theoretical: the first chapter focuses on the history of children’s literature, with a particular emphasis on British history and culture; the second chapter focuses on the definition, audience, and genres composing children’s literature; and the third chapter focuses on one of the most celebrated writers for children of the last decade, the British author Julia Donaldson, and her work The Rhyming Rabbit (2011). This latter chapter demonstrates the complex nature of children’s literature, highlighting the possibility of intertextuality – whereby one genre is merged with another or more. The final two chapters focus on the theme of translation: the fourth presents a translation proposal of the aforementioned picturebook The Rhyming Rabbit, offering insights into the challenges faced by translators in creating an effective product for the target readers; and the fifth provides an overview on the topic of translation for children, followed by a case-based analysis of the challenges and the translation strategies employed in the translation of picturebooks, with a particular focus on Donaldson’s The Rhyming Rabbit.