Tooth Fairy or Pocket Money? A Master Thesis investigating the mediation of interlingual translation between the two cultural constellations of English and Dutch in popular picture books

Abstract

This thesis investigated how translation mediates between two cultural constellations in popular picture books. Picture books are books written for the youngest generation of children which include illustrations and have the purposes to entertain, to create meaning by giving names to things, and to educate children about the world around them including cultures, people, customs and behaviours. The main research question of this thesis research was: How does textual and visual translation mediate between the cultural constellations of English and Dutch in popular picture books published in Great Britain and the Netherlands? Previous research into the translation of picture books in combination with the factor of culture has shown to be scarce. This, together with the fact that mediating between cultures in translation can take on many different forms and can have different effects on the young and vulnerable target audience, implies the need to investigate the cultural translations of picture books. By adopting House’s Translation Quality Assessment (2015), the source texts (STs), illustrations and translations (TTs) of ten popular picture books that were originally published in Great Britain and were later translated for a Dutch audience were analysed to find out how textual and visual translation mediates between the cultural constellations of Dutch and English. Results showed two types of differences in textual translation between the two cultural constellations, revealing very few explicitly culturally motivated differences between the STs and the TTs, but more differences concerning linguistic style conventions. Regarding visual translation, all illustrations were identical in the STs and TTs and the text-image relationships remained unchanged from ST to TT. The few findings related to cultural differences probably resulted from the fact that the themes of the books were universal and cultural-unspecific. Therefore, suggestions for future research are to further explore popular picture books in translation to see whether they mostly have cultural-unspecific themes and to find out whether this is a reason why they are translated more easily (and possibly more often) than cultural-specific picture books. Furthermore, the method of analysis was found to be a limitation in this research, which led to the suggestion to take the same corpus and/or cultural constellations but adopt another methodological approach, to see if other methods would gather the same results.