Abroad or Back Home? Reflecting on Foreignizing and Domesticating Tendencies Observed in Children’s Literature Translated into Albanian

Abstract

This article aims to investigate children’s literature translated into Albanian in order to identify tendencies of foreignization and domestication and the degree of visibility of the original author and culture versus the translator in the target text. Firstly, there will be introduced theoretical views from various translation studies scholars such as Schleiermacher, Berman, Venuti, Tymoczko, etc. in order to create the necessary background of the present study. Afterwards, several examples will be extracted from children’s literature translated into Albanian, the comparison of which to the original will be crucial to decide on the attitude of translators not only towards the original, but also towards target readers (mainly, but not exclusively children) and their culture. Aiming towards a wide encompassing study, extracted examples from the translated variants into Albanian will be compared not only to the original, but also among themselves (in those cases in which there is more than one translation of the same source text) in order to explore the degree of submission or resistance of source text to target language cultural values through translation. Such a thorough comparison will contribute to a diachronic analysis of the outlined tendencies and considerations about the level of achievement of the intended effect. Finally, the paper will be completed by some conclusions and recommendations referring to the corpus analyzed and overall to the translation of children’s literature in general.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2013.v4n10p564