Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature

Book excerpt: From Struwwelpeter to Peter Rabbit, from Alice to Bilbo—this collection of essays shows how the classics of children’s literature have been transformed across languages, genres, and diverse media forms. This book argues that translation regularly involves transmediation—the telling of a story across media and vice versa—and that transmediation is a specific form of translation. Beyond the classic examples, the book also takes the reader on a worldwide tour, and examines, among other things, the role of Soviet science fiction in North Korea, the ethical uses of Lego Star Wars in a Brazilian context, and the history of Latin translation in children’s literature. Bringing together scholars from more than a dozen countries and language backgrounds, these cross-disciplinary essays focus on regularly overlooked transmediation practices and terminology, such as book cover art, trans-sensory storytelling, écart, enfreakment, foreignizing domestication, and intra-cultural transformation.