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A Diachronic Examination of the Korean Translations of Poil de Carotte: Issues Regarding Translations for Children

Sunheui Park 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Poil de Carotte (Hongdangmou in Korean), generally known as a children’s story, is a French autobiographical novel of the writer, Jules Renard, based on childhood memories of being unloved by his mother. The focus of some episodes of this novel is not only on the mother who abuses her son, but also on the violent child who cruelly kills small animals. These episodes in Poil de Carotte, call for a caveat as to their suitability for a children’s story. If one considers that one purpose of children’s literature is the protection of children’s emotions and if propriety in language teaching for child readers must be observed, then some translation strategies must be employed to relieve the cruelty and violence of the original text to make Poil de Carotte an appropriate novel for children. In this study, we examined the diachrony of the translation methods in the Korean versions of Poil de Carotte by comparing the past and present versions published from the 1970s until the 2000s. We investigated if this diachrony was in accordance with the features appropriate for the target readers by comparing adult and child versions. Finally, we examined its readability and its suitability for child readers, from an educational perspective, by focusing on the tense of narration, the tone of the character portrayal, and the clarity of euphemisms in the translated versions.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.