The Great Kapok Tree Growing With Turkish Children: A Kincentric "Writing Project

Abstract

Environmental problems, increasingly felt on a global scale, have necessitated environmental education from a very young age, a vital component of sustainable development efforts. As an integral part of this education, environmental children’s literature, especially picturebooks, can give young children the necessary knowledge, cultivate environmental awareness, help develop sustainable behavioral patterns, and increase environmental literacy. In a similar vein, translated picturebooks can create comparable impacts through intentional translational strategies adopted by all translation agents involved in the process. Approaching translation as a writing project, this study aims to explore how the Turkish translation of the environmental picturebook, The Great Kapok Tree, can help foster a kincentric worldview through adding and omitting semiotic modes in the target text and analyze how these changes may transform and potentially enhance or diminish environmental messages in the translated version. The findings reveal the efficacy of the translator’s and other translation agents’ active involvement in the translation process by framing the translation as a writing project that can reshape the source text to achieve environmental and educational goals. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2025.