Kulturspezifika als Schlüssel zur Schaffung der Ambivalenz in Kinderbüchern. Ein Übersetzungsvergleich

Abstract

This paper examines one of the distinctive features of children’s literature, namely ambivalence or dual readership, in the German children’s book Rico, Oskar und die Tieferschatten (2008) by Andreas Steinhöfel and its Catalan and Spanish translations. The choice of this book is explained by the special role of cultural specifics as the key to creating ambivalence in the source text. On this basis, the hypothesis is put forward here that the success of the target text depends on maintaining ambivalence. To this end, the characteristics of ambivalence in both the source text and the target texts will be explored by means of a qualitative analysis and a corpus-based translation compari-son. In order to analyze the ambivalence in the target texts, the translation strategies in the text passages that are significant for the creation of ambivalence are first identified and determined. The starting point for this analysis is the causal relationship between the choice of specific translation strategies and the global translation method. Depend-ing on the intended function of the translation, whether it tends towards the target cul-ture or the source culture, certain strategies are more suitable than others, so that a con-tinuum of translation strategies can be depicted. The opposing poles of this continuum indicate the degree of interventionism and adaptation to the target culture, and vice versa. The ideological implications for the translation and the target culture are drawn from the predominance of a particular translation method.