Marija Zlatnar Moe & Tanja Žigon

When the audience changes: Translating adult fiction for young readers

This paper deals with the issue of the change of the intended reader in translations of fiction from English into Slovene, and its stylistic consequences for the target text. Within Slovene culture, this shift is most frequent in the translation of fantasy fiction and comics, but not limited to it. The intended reader frequently changes from adult to young, and never the other way round. Concentrating on the example of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which was translated by a prominent translator of literature for children, we show how this shift of intended reader influences individual translation strategies and the grammatical, stylistic and syntactical solutions on the micro-level, and the ways in which those solutions influence the text as a whole, thus adapting it to its new audience.

Keywords: literary translation, adult fiction, intended audience, young readers

Biography

Marija Zlatnar Moe is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). She works in the Department of Translation. She has a PhD in Literary Studies (2003) and an MA in English (1999). Her research is focused mainly on literary (prose and drama) translation. Most recently she has studied stylistic changes in translations of popular fiction, followed by a study of stylistic changes in contemporary literary texts. Her current projects include research on translations of Ibsen into Slovene, and a study of the latest translation of Hamlet. She also works as a part-time literary translator from English and Norwegian into Slovene.

Tanja Žigon is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation at the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). She has a PhD in Literary Studies (2008) and an MA in Modern German Literature (2003). Her recent positions include Deputy Head of the Department of Translation of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana, and Literature Chair in German in the Department of Translation (2011–2014). She is a leading member of the Intercultural Literary Studies research group at the Scientific Institute of the Faculty of Arts (since 2013) and also Project Coordinator for Slovenia for the EU Project TransStar: Raising Transcultural, Digital and Multitranslational Competences.