Exploring the Nature of Translation of Names in Children’s Literature

Le Petit Nicolas is a bestselling series of children’s storybooks written by René Goscinny and illustrated by Jean-Jacques Sempé. With Sempé, Goscinny imagined the adventures of Nicolas and presented a children's language with run-on sentences using the stream of consciousness, which has charmed readers since the first publication of the stories in the late 1950s; consequently, the stories have been translated into more than 40 languages, including Turkish, English, and German. The variety of decisions made by different translators with regard to the translation of names from the same source text is particularly remarkable in the case of the series. This study focuses on the treatment of children’s names in nine translations of Le Petit Nicolas: translations into Turkish by Vivet Kanetti, Eray Canberk, Ümit Ülker, Saadet Özen, and Esra Erdoğan; English translations by Stella Rodway, Anthea Bell, and an unnamed translator; and a German translation by Hans Georg Lenzen. Using Jan Van Collie's classification of ten possible strategies, the study discusses the decisions made by various translators as to the ways in which to render names in children's literature, possible reasons for these decisions, and their consequences for the readability and understandability of the text for children. In addition, the advantages and constraints of each choice are highlighted. Moreover, the study shows that each choice produces different results and can add to or subtract from the story's meaning, which makes it important to analyze the names in the source text before deciding how to express them in the target language.

Keywords

Sempé, Goscinny, Le Petit Nicolas, Jean Van Collie, children’s literature, translation of names