As mentioned, in translation a common way of manipulating text is to modify language that may have been suitable at the time and place of its origin but is sexist, or racist, violent or otherwise inappropriate from the contemporary perspective. According to Lathey (2016:27) and Fernández-López (2006:47–49), racist and xenophobic elements were removed from Enid Blyton’s and Roald Dahl’s books in Britain in the 1980s. In Finland, a well-known example of controversial language is the translations of Astrid Lindgren’s Swedish book Pippi Långstrump.
As Koskinen and Paloposki (2015:224) explain, in 2005 WSOY published a revised version of Peppi Pitkätossu (Pippi Långstrump in Swedish, translated by Laila Järvinen in 1946) with a new title Minä olen Peppi Pitkätossu (revised by Päivö Taubert), and the main reason for this was to remove the n-word. According to Koskinen and Paloposki (2015:225), the publisher had received negative feedback from the readers and decided to change the racist slur. Interestingly, the reviser did not consider the word negative in its context, nor did Kristiina Rikman, the translator of the following retranslation in 2007 (Koskinen & Paloposki 2015: 223-226). In the
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said translation, the n-word substituted with the expression hottentotti, which not a neutral ex-pression but has racist connotations (Rastas 2013:33). Hottentotti is a derogatory exex-pression that refers to an African people called khoi (Kielitoimiston sanakirja, 24 January 2019).
Koskinen and Paloposki (2015:227) similarly point out that using the expression hottentotti, is a strategy that avoids the usage of the n-word, but which is not necessarily more neutral.
However, Koskinen and Paloposki (2015: 226) note, if the publisher had decided to use the n-word in the new retranslation, it would have signaled a stand for a racist language, which goes against the norm of tolerance. It might be possible to claim that in this case it has been easier to modify the language in a retranslation than to publish a revised version of the source text. For a long time, Astrid Lindgren’s family refused to edit the Swedish source text, but Lindgren’s daughter Karin Nyman changed her opinion in 2015 after acknowledging that the word is hurtful to contemporary children who read the text (Koskinen and Paloposki 2015:223-226). However, the notion of the racist word’s hurtfulness allows us to think further about the assumed readership of children’s books. A simple realization that a racist word can directly affect the reader implies to an understanding that the assumed readership does not con-sist solely of white children. This is discussed by Koskinen and Paloposki (2015) who argue that there are more and more people of color in the Finnish readership and for them, just as for white people, literature and way characters are named are a way to build identity. The question is thus not about how to address the “Others”, but how to refer to characters with whom that the readers might identify themselves (Koskinen and Paloposki 2015: 228).
Rastas (2007:129) argues that the Finnish discussion about the n-word is charac-terized by exceptionalism. Exceptionalism in this case means the use of the word is justified by the claim that the Finnish word has been neutral and free from negative or derogatory intent.
However, as Rastas argues, the word is and has always been inherently negative and oppressing, as it associates stereotypical and negative features to the people whom it is used to describe and define. The expression, in other words, refers to a racist representation. As Rastas (2007:129) points out, typical form of exceptionalism is the assumption that in Finland the n-word is used to refer to others, although there are Finnish people of color. Rastas (2007: 119–141) further exemplifies that people of color whom she interviewed in her study considered the world very negative.
Heikkilä-Halttunen (2013:27-61) has illustrated how the n-word as well as racist representations have been visible in the domestic Finnish children’s literature. In 1950, the word was used, for instance, in a poem that was published the alphabet book Kultainen aapinen.
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According to Heikkilä-Halttunen (2013: 32, 38), Finnish children’s literature reproduced impe-rialist, colonialist as well as racist representations until 1950s and 1960, or even in the 1970s.
The racialization of people who did not fit the western norm was not questioned, and children’s books often contained stereotypical and racialized images of children in the developing coun-tries. While these representations began to change into more positive ones in the 1980s, they nevertheless often focused on others in distant countries.
Van Camp’s (1994) research illustrates Nikolajeva’s (2005: 253) argument that what constitutes morally charged or problematic topics and elements is culturally bound. Van Camp (1994) has studied the Dutch (1983) and German (1965) translation of Pippi Longstock-ing. Originally the first Pippi book was translated in Dutch in 1952 and in German in 1949. Van Camp focuses on stylistic and linguistic features such as omissions, additions and substitutions but she also briefly discusses adaptation that has moral and educational grounds. According to Van Camp (1994:41), a passage in which Pippi shows disrespect towards the teacher at school is omitted from the Dutch version but not from the German version. On the other hand, those scenes that have military undertones are condensed and omitted in the German translation but not in the Dutch translation. They include a scene in which Pippi does a military salutation and another where she distributes guns to Tommy and Annika. As Van Camp (1994) argues, these were taboo issues in Germany due to the proximity of the Second World War in 1949, when the first translation was published. However, the passages were not changed in the successive versions (Van Camp 1994:42). Interestingly, Van Camp (1994) does not discuss the racist ele-ments of Pippi, and one of the reasons might or might not be that they were not considered controversial or somehow relevant when the books were translated or in the early 1990s when the study was conducted.
Trupej (2012) studied the impact of political ideology in translating racists dis-course by focusing on the translation of racist slurs in two Slovenian translations of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The first translation (Pustolovščine Huckle-berryja Finna) is from 1948 by Pavel Holeček and the second (Prigode HuckleHuckle-berryja Finna) from 1962 by Janes Gradišnik (Trupej 2012). The first translation was published three years after the establishment of the socialist government in Slovenia. Trupej (2012:96) discovered that in the 1948 translation the racist discourse was often toned down. This was done, for in-stance, by omitting the racist slur, the n-word, from the text by substituting it with the first name of the character or a personal pronoun or by using the Slovenian words for slave and black servant (Trupej 2012: 96-97).
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However, according to Trupej (2012) racist elements were intensified in several instances. For example, when the character Huck refers to the character Jim with the personal pronoun ‘he’ in the source text, a Slovenian racist word is used in the translation. There are also occasions when the same word is used to substitute the names of other African American char-acters (Trupej 2012:98). Trupej (2012) connects this strategy to a wider socialist political ide-ology and suggests that intensifying the racism expressed by American characters was a way to associate negative features to the United States of America and the capitalist ideology.
The 1962 Slovenian translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was published in a different political situation, and according to Trupej, this translation differs from the previ-ous one since it shows no intensification of racist discourse. On the contrary, racism has been toned down on several occasions. Examples of this are omitting the n-word by using a personal pronoun or by substituting it with a more neutral Slovenian expression that refers to ‘black person’. Despite the fact that Trupej (2012) does not discuss Mark Twain’s book Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in the context of children’s literature, it can be regarded as children’s litera-ture or youth literalitera-ture – at least its Finnish translation is placed in the children’s section at some libraries.
Weissbrod (2008) has studied the translation of racist elements in the Hebrew translation of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. According to Weissbrod (2006: 176), racism is generally not modified in the Israeli Hebrew translations of either children’s or adults’
literature, despite the fact that the translation norms which guide translation do not require ad-equacy but allow manipulation, such as omission and additions. Weissbrod (2008) further ar-gues that racist elements are occasionally omitted or amplified in translation or editing, but they are more likely a result of some other strategy than conscious approach towards racism. This is the case, for instance, in the 1964 translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. As a part of the strategy to render the dialect spoken by Jim into Hebrew, Jim refers to himself in third person. As a result, this gives an impression of Jim as a childish person, which in its turn rein-forces racism (Weissbrod 2008:178). However, Weissbrod (2008:181) argues that in some cases racism is apologized or explained. An example of this is the 2001 Hebrew translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn which is based on Michael Patrick Hearn’s notated version of the book (Weissbrod 2008). The translation also includes commentary on the racist language of the book. The usage of the racist n-word is explained to be a part of the character Huck’s
‘upbringing, class and rhetoric’ and it is noted that changing the word or substituting it would be considered anachronistic (Weissbrod 2008).
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Epstein (2014) has studied the translation strategies of Mark Twain’s The Adven-tures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) in Scandinavian languages, i.e. Norwegian, Swedish and Dan-ish. Overall, the material of the study consists of 15 Swedish translations, one Danish and one Norwegian. The Danish text is from 1981, The Norwegian from 2004 and the Swedish texts span from 1906 to 2003. According to Epstein (2014), a common translation strategy has been standardization of colloquial speech of the characters. Interestingly, Epstein (2014:89) explains that while both white and black characters use dialect in the source text, the speech of white characters, for example Huck and his father, tends to be translated into standardized language.
However, the dialect of black characters such as Jim tends not to be translated into standard language. Epstein (2014:90) also notes that in the translations, Jim’s Swedish, Norwegian or Danish is not really dialect but rather broken language. Epstein (2014:90) argues that using broken language in the translation gives and impression that the character is child-like and less intelligent, which has similarities with Weissbrod’s (2008:178) claim that the 1964 Hebrew 1964 translation of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn gives an impression that Jim is a childish character.
Säily (1995) has studied dialect in two Finnish translation of Twain’s The Adven-tures of Huckleberry Finn. The two translations studied were by Yrjö Kivimies (1927) and Jarkko Laine (1972). Säily (1995:49) discovered that Kivimies has translated Jim’s speech into a made-up dialect, which gives an impression that he is not speaking his own mother tongue.
Säily’s (1995) and Epstein’s (2013) studies reveal similarities between the translation strategies of the Finnish translation from 1927 and some of the translations into Scandinavian languages.
The racist language and representations in children’s books, including classics, have been problematized partly due to the multiculturalist discourse. As Pesonen (2013:70) argues, multiculturalism in general has been topical since the 2000s in Finland and the diversity of the Finnish society is being acknowledged more often. Similarly, multiculturalism has be-come a recurring theme in children’s literature as well as literary research (Rastas 2013). Rastas (2013), however reminds that multiculturalism is a concept that does not have a clear definition;
in fact, its meaning may vary depending on the context in which it is used. According to Rastas (2013:13), in Europe the term has often referred to the coexistence of different religions while in the USA it has strong connections to anti-racism and political activism of people of color.
According to Gopalakrishnan (2011:5), multicultural children’s literature vali-dates all sociocultural experiences, including those occurring because of language, race, gender,
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class, sexual orientation and ethnicity. Moreover, Gopalakrishnan (2011:5) argues that multi-cultural literature deals with sociomulti-cultural experiences of previously underrepresented groups.
Similarly, Persiani-Becker (2011b: 207–209) claims that multicultural children’s literature in-cludes texts in which the experiences and reality of, for example, people with disabilities or chronic illnesses are recognized and represented. As I see it, multicultural literature can be re-garded as something that challenges and questions the prevailing demeaning representations and presents new, more positive, accurate and diverse representations.
According to Pesonen (2013:79), portraying difference and accepting diversity has become a part of the pedagogical function that is associated with children’s literature. Sim-ilarly, Gopalakrishan (2011:5) highlights that children’s literature offers both children and par-ents stories and characters to which they can relate as well as gives means to empathize with other people. Another important issue concerning multiculturalism is the question of whose point of view becomes visible and who is allowed to tell stories about minorities, as Heikkilä-Halttunen (2013:56) reminds. The topic is linked to the concept of implied reader, as it ad-dresses the question of who can relate to the themes and the contents of a book.
According to Heikkilä-Halttunen (2013:49), it has been typical in Finland that translated children’s literature, picture books in particular, have been published partly to test whether the audience approve and like multicultural themes. Then, multicultural themes have become more popular in domestic illustrated children’s books. What can be interpreted from Heikkilä-Halttunen’s (2013:49) argument is that translated children’s literature influences the domestic children’s literature. Therefore, it is important to study translated children’s literature and ideally provide more information to the translators and other agents involved in the trans-lation process.
42 3.6 Violence in children’s literature
Since children’s literature and translating elements that are viewed as unacceptable for children was discussed earlier and since the themes discussed to some extent overlapped with violent and brutal elements, violence in children’s literature is discussed here very briefly. Another reason for this is that theoretical literature specifically concentrating on translating violent ele-ments in children’s literature was difficult to find.
Social or cultural norms and even laws regarding violence may influence how violence is incorporated or described in children’s literature. Moreover, as Øster (2006:150) points out, translation strategies of brutal and harsh elements can reflect how children and child-hood are viewed in a culture or a society. In terms of violence this can mean that translation strategies are affected by the views of what amount and type of violence is considered suitable or harmful for children to read, hear or see (Øster 2006:150). As an example, Øster (2006:150) mentions the 1944 American translation of Den lille pige med svovlstikkerne (The Little Match Girl, 1846). In the translation, the ending was altered so that the match girl does not die but an old woman finds her and starts to look after her. One reason for this was, as Øster (2006: 150) further points out, that the ending was considered too harsh for young readers. Similarly, Lathey (2016:25) describes that the translations of Cinderella (Aschenputtel) which are targeted at chil-dren commonly omit the scene in which the feet of the stepsisters are mutilated. In the Grimms’
version the first sister cuts of her toe and the other her heel to make the slipper fit and both their feet bleed. Similarly, the scene in which the doves peck the stepsisters’ eyes is often removed, as both Lathey (2016:25) and Pokorn (2012) point out.
Fernández López (2006:41) refers to MacLeod (1994:179), according to whom violence has not been an avoided theme in American children’s literature, provided that it does not breed more violence in the story. Similarly, Persiani-Becker (2011a:129), writing from the perspective of the USA, argues that violence in children’s literature does not necessarily have to be avoided because it can have a pedagogical function. Writing about violence can give readers means to understand it as well as provide information about history of violence.
43 3.7 Disability in literature
In this thesis, I present the results of my study which focused on how the expressions of racism, violence and disability are translated the Finnish (re)translations of Burnett’s The Secret Gar-den. As the theoretical approach and studies presented above illustrate, translating racist lan-guage and the n-word in particular have been taken into account in the context of children’s literature and translating children’s literature. Similarly, the translation strategies of brutal, or even violent, elements in children’s literature are typically discussed at least to some extent.
However, finding research and literature on how disability and possible negative representation of disability are addressed in translations of children’s literature turned out to be difficult.
Therefore, I will rely on literary disability studies as I briefly present and discuss disability in literature and in children’s literature. It is noteworthy that literary disability studies focus mainly on adults’ literature. However, many of the points made, for instance, about the role of disabled characters in the narrative may apply to children’s literature.
Barker and Murray (2018:3–8) point out that disability in literature has become a more prominent and established field of study. According to them (ibid.), Thomson’s (1997) book Extraordinary Bodies (1997) was one of the foundational books in establishing central terminology of the field as well as applying approaches of literary studies and critical and cul-tural theory in order to study representation of disability in literature.
Thomson (1997:9, 11) argues that disabled characters in fiction are often presented as uncomplicated figures, exotic beings and even a spectacle; they are commonly depicted and portrayed in terms of their disability and rarely have other traits. Thomson (1997:11) further points out that disability may have an intended literary effect or a function that relies on cultural stereotypes of disability.
The expression ‘disability’ can refer to congenital and acquired differences, mental illness, chronic and acute illness (Thomson 1997:13). Sometimes impairment and disability are distinguished from one another. Impairment refers to the physical, material features of body whereas disability refers to the social dimension. Thus, an impairment, such as hear loss, be-comes a disability when society creates obstacles for those with the impairment (Donaldson 2011:190). According to Donaldson (2011:104), the distinction has been crucial within disabil-ity studies, but it also has its limitations as, for example, mental impairments are not always clearly materialized in the human body, and a physical or a medical condition cannot in each case be easily distinguished from its cultural and social meanings or definitions. Similarly,
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Quayson (2007:3–4) argues that especially in literature the distinction is not clear-cut, and it is not always considered necessary or possible to make.
In literature, disability and disabled characters are often viewed and interpreted as metaphors, and disability may be used as a textual device (Thomson 1997:10; Barker and Mur-ray 2018:2). According to Davidson (2018:74) many major modernist works use disability or disease is a figure or metaphor of social or cultural malaise or problems. As examples of such novels, Davidson (2018:74) mentions Charlotte Perkins Gillman’s The Yellow Wallpaper (1892) and Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome (1911). In some cases, words describing diseases or malaise are used to describe society. As an example, Davidson (2018:74) mentions how Søren Kirkegaard describes modernity as “sickness unto death”.
As Murray (2018:100) points out, contemporary representation of disability can be complex or avoid stereotypes, such as being a metaphor or being reduced to a trait. According to Murray (2018:99), an example of such texts is Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel The Unnamed, in
As Murray (2018:100) points out, contemporary representation of disability can be complex or avoid stereotypes, such as being a metaphor or being reduced to a trait. According to Murray (2018:99), an example of such texts is Joshua Ferris’s 2010 novel The Unnamed, in