Traduire, un jeu d'enfants? : Les enjeux de la traduction en suédois d'un livre documentaire français pour enfants

Sammanfattning: The aim of this essay is to identify and find solutions to some of the difficulties occurring when translating into Swedish a French non-fiction book for children. Solid research has already been done about translating children’s literature. However, these studies often focus on novels and picture books and rarely non-fiction books. The source text used as primary material for our translation and the essay is an extract from the non-fiction book Petites et grandes histoires des animaux disparus, written and illustrated by Damien Laverdunt and Hélène Rajcak and published in 2010 by the French publishing house Actes Sud. The book presents 27 extinct animals and the history about them and their extinction. Basing this essay on research about translating for children, we will begin with an analysis of the skopos – Reiss and Vermeer’s skopos theory about aim and function – of the source and target text, to be able to conceive the translation for our target reader and the socio-cultural and linguistic context in which the reader is living. Monica Reichenberg’s study about different versions of text-books, and their effect on a Swedish child reader’s comprehension including strategies to create a dynamic and intelligible text, will then help us to find the correct translation strategy for our target text. Finally, cultural references and their translation will be discussed considering Venuti’s studies about “domestication” and “foreignization” and Oittinen’s theories about children’s literature and “domestication”. During the essay, the translator’s choices and the motivations behind them will all be discussed taking into consideration the skopos and the linguistic and socio-cultural context of the target reader.