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Translation of Children’s Picture Book as Iconotext: Focusing on the Domestication of Illustrations

Kim Do-hun 1

1부산외국어대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

Translating children’s picture book is a complex and dynamic activity, as it deals with a non-conventional text type which involves both words and graphic devices. In other words, children’s picture book is a type of iconotext in which two individual text components-words and illustrations-complement and react with each other and form a new and dynamic text. Of course, this exceptional nature of the genre provides dynamism as well as hardship to the process of translation, as the target text will have to re-balance the relationship and interaction of the two major text constituents. This paper purports to expand the current literature on the translation of children’s picture book by examining it in the framework of iconotext. It will explore the multi-dimensional and multi-faceted relations between words and illustrations and examine how such devices contribute to forming a completed text and to delivering message in an effective manner. With a clear understanding of the iconocity of the children’s picture book, this paper then seeks to stress the need to adjust or domesticate source text illustrations in the process of translation. Examples of domesticated illustrations will be presented and their roles and contributions will be studied. In addition, non-domesticated illustrations-but which should have been domesticated indeed-will also be presented, so as to show the non-equivalence and incompleteness of text caused by lack of efforts to re-balance the target words and illustrations. It is of notable interest that only the words have received attention in the translation practice as well as in the translation studies. The author hopes the research will contribute to triggering further discussion on the translation of children’s picture book from the iconotext perspective.

Citation status

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