How Does a Child Become a Bambino? Creating child Constructions in Translation

The paper examines how different child cultures affect translation. The study compares a short story for children: The It-doesn’t-matter Suit by Silvia Plath and its Italian translation Il vestito color zafferano by Bianca Pitzorno. Translating such a child-targeted text involves not only assessing the developing cognitive skills of a young reader/listener and his/her relatively limited “world experience”, but also being aware of the socio-cultural environment in which the child moves. Whilst it may be supposed that the readers/listeners will be young children, the authors and the translators are adults who are writing or translating for children and the translation strategy adopted will be influenced by the cultural differences in adult-child relations between the two countries. The study uses a functional linguistic approach to analyse how the information structure of the text changes in translation. It shows how the translator’s different choices of themes, rhemes and the types of thematic progression may be linked not so much to the two different language codes but more to a need to render the text communicatively equivalent for a different target audience, i.e. Italian children. The themes, based on information retrievable from the co-text or context, are often shown to differ in the translation because of a different point of departure dependent on Italian culture. In fact the translator constantly reorganizes the text in order to create a construction of the child protagonist in the story which respects Italian canons of childhood, therefore rendering the text equivalent and acceptable to young Italian child readers. The translator thus creates a textual organisation that is different from the original but which permits the translated message to have the same impact in the new cultural context as it had in the original.