Looking in the ‘problem’ basket: The translation of Australian cultural referents in children’s books

Helen T Frank, School of Languages and Linguistics, The University of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Both tourism literature and translation endeavour to create an experience for the reader by establishing a balance between content that is ‘real’ and content that is oversanitized. The existence of varying degrees of ‘Australianness’ in children’s fiction selected for French translation leads to the general supposition that to translate means to be interested in the ‘otherness’ of the source culture. This sets up the expectation that something of the source culture will be carried over in the translation due to the specificity of the Australian text. The degree of interest in Australian features can be measured in translations by the type and extent of cultural adaptation. Heavy deletion and adaptation of Australian content reflects either a low interest level in ‘Australianness’ in general or a form of censorship of material regarded as negative. This paper examines cultural referents that do not reflect a positive exoticism and are therefore assumed to be less appealing to a foreign culture, leading to modification or deletion in translation. Assuming that one of the aims of translating books for children is to provide knowledge of a foreign culture, modifying or omitting passages containing Australian content is clearly going against the desire to promote international understanding.