La traduzione della letteratura per l’infanzia dal finlandese all’italiano: l’esempio degli albi illustrati di Mauri Kunnas

Abstract

<p> Despite the increasing number of research on translating for children, no study has so far<br /> taken into consideration the translations of children&rsquo;s literature from Finnish into Italian. This<br /> dissertation sets out to fill this gap with a comparative study of Finnish picturebooks and their<br /> translations into Italian. Besides being the first research in the field analysing the shifts<br /> between these two systems, the study thoroughly investigates the characteristics of the<br /> translation process of picturebooks. The works chosen as case study are the Finnish<br /> picturebooks by Mauri Kunnas and their Italian translations from the period 1979-2009<br /> because they are characterized by a high number of linguistic and cultural complexities which<br /> challenge translators&rsquo; skills and knowledge.<br /> The dissertation establishes whether and how culture-specific elements (anthroponyms,<br /> toponyms, food and allusions) and the word-image interaction have a significant impact on<br /> the quality and the nature of the target works, and also whether these aspects are still<br /> consistent after the translation and the adaptation process to the target system. Since<br /> picturebooks are multimodal texts whose message is produced by both the verbal and the<br /> visual, it has been necessary to use a multimodal comparative analysis. Such a descriptive<br /> comparative study has allowed me to describe the textual and cultural manipulations<br /> undergone by Kunnas&rsquo;s picturebooks translated into Italian. Indeed, it has helped to identify<br /> what kind of shifts occur when cultural specific elements are transferred from the source<br /> system to the target one, to determine the most frequent translation strategies used to ensure a<br /> higher degree of readability, and to establish whether particular translation choices have<br /> contributed to modify the word-image interaction.<br /> The results of the multimodal comparative analysis have shown that Italian translators have<br /> been deeply influenced by the preponderance of the illustrations and for this reason they have<br /> often verbalised the visual and added information not originally contained in the source<br /> written text. Moreover, the findings of the analysis together with the interviews to the Italian<br /> translator and publishing house have also demonstrated that the latter aimed at producing<br /> works &ldquo;good for the child&rdquo; &ndash; and at the same time &ldquo;good for the adult&rdquo; &ndash; and at minimising<br /> Finnish cultural specificity, even to the detriment of the aesthetic nature of the original<br /> picturebooks.</p>