Translation of Sounds for Children: an Example of a Multimodal Work

Abstract

Translation of poetry, particularly intended for children, has always been considered as one of the most problematic and challenging sub-fields of literary translation. As the texts are read aloud to young children until they achieve reading abilities, the read-aloud elements such as onomatopoeia, assonance, alliteration, rhyme, meter, intonation, and stress remain as the most attractive stylistic features in children's poetry; nevertheless, translation of these read-aloud elements, together with the pedagogical content, requires special attention by translators. To better and more effectively attract the attention of the children of this digital era, in the last years, the multimodality of children's literature has been foregrounded with the combinations of written language, visual images, and musical touch in both print and digital form, necessitating work in many layers by translators. In this framework, the main aim of this present research is to reveal some of the translation problems related to the sound elements in a multimodal children's work and the solutions the translator finds to achieve semantic and cognitive equivalence in terms of the sound effects in the Turkish translation of Wild Symphony, a sound-effective, interactive, and multimodal children's work. The results demonstrate that the multimodal nature of the original work renders additional challenges for the translator to achieve equivalence between the music in the digital environment and the musicality of the linguistic words; thus, requiring different types of translation strategies. © Peter Lang GmbH.