A Descriptive Study of Translating Children's Fantasy Fiction

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A Descriptive Study of Translating Children's Fantasy Fiction

Wen-chun Liang a
a
School of Modern Languages, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
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A Descriptive Study of Translating
Children’s Fantasy Fiction
Wen-chun Liang
School of Modern Languages, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, UK
Owing to the imperfect knowledge and language ability of child readers, translators
often encounter great difficulties and challenges in translating children’s literature.
It can, therefore, be assumed that when translating children’s fantasy literature,
which is in a highly local cultural form, translators often encounter translating
problems concerning culture-specific items and are easily trapped in the dilemma of
whether to ‘foreignise’ or to ‘domesticate’ such items. This study focuses on
translation problems and strategies regarding culture-specific items by analysing
the first five Harry Potter (HP) books and their corresponding Taiwanese versions.
More specifically, the present study aims to shed light on the implications of how the
adopted strategies affect target readers’ acceptance, and whether those strategies
are innovative or established, by looking at the relation of the HP translations and
the polysystem of translated children’s fantasy literature in Taiwan. The effective-

ness of the translation strategies chosen which may be used as a yardstick when
Downloaded At: 23:26 18 February 2009
discussing acceptability in translating culture-specific items in children’s fantasy

literature
questionnaires.
was evaluated by observing 15 target readers’ response through
doi: 10.1080/13670050802153830
Keywords: Harry Potter, culture-specific items, foreign implantation, readers’

response, literary polysystem
Introduction
Literary translation has long been viewed as a cross-cultural form of
communicative behaviour and is probably one of mankind’s most complex
activities. Yet, owing to the lack of a comprehensive understanding of cultural
differences and cross-cultural interactions, translation scholars and translators
often find literary translation a thorny issue. Translation scholars, therefore,
endeavour to find solutions to such predicaments, and the focus of Translation
Studies (TS) before 1970s was confined to the fields of linguistics and linguistic
philosophy, which are prescriptive and source-oriented.
The advent, in the early 1970s, of polysystem theory and its derivate
concepts, such as translational norms, agents of power, ideology and
translation, has led TS toward a new horizon. As a result, literary translation
has received scrutiny in a wider cultural context with a focus on the
translational norms and constraints that govern the production and reception
of literary translation. This is precisely the conception of the ‘cultural turn’,
which holds that translation is not a conglomeration of words and sentences
between two languages, but is emblematic of its cultural context and is a
cultural entity emerging from two divergent cultural universes (Bassnett &
0907-676X/07/02 092-14 $20.00/0 – 2007 Wen-chun Liang

Perspectives: Studies in Translatology Vol. 15, No. 2, 2007
92
Translating Children’s Fantasy Fiction 93
Lefevere, 1998). Translations are believed to reflect the cultural and historical
conditions in which they have been produced. Many translation scholars
therefore make inquiries about the relationship between translation and
culture by looking at how culture influences and constrains translation, and
further investigate the manipulative textual processes of translation (Bassnett
& Lefevere, 1998: 123). This shift of focus in literary translation is one of the
most groundbreaking achievements in TS, and approaches to literary transla-
tion have been regarded as descriptive, target-oriented, functional and
systemic.
Although the development of globalisation stimulates cross-cultural inter-
actions and engenders better mutual understanding as human beings become
acquainted with one another’s culture, imbalance in power relations is a prickly
real world fact which can create an imbalanced cultural understanding. The
Anglo-American and Indo-European cultures are more visible in the global
context than other, minority cultures. This statement is generally true; however,
there are parts of the Western cultures that are not so visible to minority cultures,
for instance myth, folklore, legend and history, owing to their intrinsically minor
status in the cross-cultural interactions. In literature, the aforementioned
subsystems of culture are often found in the fantasy genre. For example,
many Western fantasy literatures were permeated by Greco-Roman myth and

legend and, even today, a substantial portion of Anglophone fantasy literature
remains more or less unreadable without a knowledge of classical mythology
and mythopoeic history. It is therefore generally true that the cultural contexts
even of the highly visible cultures may be less well known within the context of
fantasy fiction.
As Manlove (1975) has stated, fantasy is a genre that creates wonder, contains
a substantial and irreducible supernatural element, and is a highly localised
form peculiarly expressive of the country where it develops. This suggests that
translators of fantasy fiction should be equipped with a comprehensive
understanding of both source and target cultures. Yet, when the target readers
are children, even if the source culture prevails over the target culture, children’s
imperfect knowledge of other cultures may create difficulties for translators. In
general, the purpose of this study is to examine the literary position of translated
children’s literature in Taiwan and to discuss the translational norms at work at
a microstructural level. Specifically, this study aims to discover the translation
strategies translators adopt in order to deal with culture-specific items, and the
implications of how the adopted strategies affect target readers’ acceptance.
The Literary Position and Translational Norms of Children’s

Fantasy Fiction in Taiwan
Bassnett and Lefevere’s (1998: 123) concept of the cultural turn suggests that
translation is not an aggregate of strings of words or sentences between two
different languages, but is rather a characteristic of its cultural context and is
itself a cultural entity. Translation should be viewed as cultural transfer. This
approach indicates that the study of translation should be situated in an
examination of wider cultural context, instead of merely linguistic context. The
development of the view of translation as a cultural entity can be traced back
94 Perspectives: Studies in Translatology
to the creation of polysystem theory by Israeli scholar Itamar Even-Zohar,

which was based on the foundation laid by the Russian Formalists at the
beginning of the 1970s.
The main tenet of polysystem theory holds literary systems to be
interrelated, stratified and dynamic. More tellingly, each literary system is
conceptualised as a network of relations that obtain through a number of
activities called ‘literary’ and these activities are themselves observed through
the network (Even-Zohar, 1978, 1990). One implication of polysystem theory is
that literary systems are never equal, but hierarchised, taking up central or
peripheral positions in the polysystem. According to Even-Zohar (1990: 131),
children’s literature occupies a peripheral and secondary position in the
literary polysystem. In other words, it rarely actively participates in shaping
the centre of the literary polysystem, and its repertoires are not regarded as
canonical. Seen in this light, children’s literature in translation can also be
assumed to be situated in a peripheral and secondary position in the literary
polysystem.
The literary polysystem is heterogeneous and consists of two (or more)
literary systems: for example, children’s literature or adult’s literature, and
even original literature or translated literature (Even-Zohar, 1990). Continuing
in this vein, viewed as a polysystem, children’s literature may also be seen as

composed of heterogeneous subordinate literary systems, for instance fairy
tales or fantasy fiction, folklore or fables, and so forth. Every literary system
assumes a different position within the literary polysystem of children’s
literature.
Translation of children’s fantasy fiction in Taiwan began in 1979 when the
Zhang-Qiao Publishing House selected and published five novels from C.S.
Lewis’s series The Chronicles of Narnia. The development of fantasy fiction in
the West had been going on since the 1950s, yet translated works only
appeared in Taiwan from the late 1970s onwards. This delay is partly
attributable to the linguistic and cultural barriers between the West and
Taiwan. During the late 1970s to early 2000s, fairy tales, adventure stories,
fables and picture books assumed the primary and central position in the
literary polysystem of (translated) children’s literature in Taiwan. The public
hardly even recognised there was such a thing as translation of children’s
fantasy fiction.
This situation continued until 2000, when the first of the seven Harry Potter
books was translated and published in Taiwan. By 2003, the first four
translations of the Harry Potter books had surpassed 3.5 million sales in
Taiwan (Chen, 2003) and are believed to have far exceeded this figure since.
The Harry Potter phenomenon has totally revolutionised the literary position of
translation of children’s fantasy fiction in Taiwan. It is without a doubt the
best-selling translated children’s literature Taiwan has ever seen.
Owing to their dominant global position and close contact with Taiwan,
Anglophone countries (such as the UK and the USA) were the main source of
materials for translation in the fantasy genre. Ever since the success of Harry
Potter in translation, its popularity has brought children’s fantasy fiction to
occupy the central position in the literary polysystem of translated children’s
literature in Taiwan, and its repertoires should have become canonised within
the domain of the children’s literature polysystem. Even-Zohar (1990) suggests

three sets of circumstances in which translated texts take a central position in
the literary polysystem: when a polysystem is nascent; when a literature is
weak or in peripheral position within a larger group of literature; or when a
literature is in a literary vacuum or crisis. One more situation might be added
to these three: when translated texts constitute what becomes the most active
literary system in a given literary polysystem, they can even occupy the central
position. To present a clearer picture of the Potter phenomenon before and
after the publication of the first translation, Table 1 shows the publication data
for translations of children’s fantasy fiction from 1996 to early 2006.
The 347 titles were published by eight Taiwanese publishers. It can be seen
from Table 1 that the publication of translations of children’s fantasy fiction
reached a peak in 2003. Many of the translated children’s fantasy titles
published were chosen from serial novels, for example C.S. Lewis’s The
Chronicles of Narnia, which consists of seven novels, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark
Materials, which is a trilogy, and Darren Shan’s The Saga of Darren Shan, which
comprises 12 novels, to name just a few. Some novels might turn out to be split
into different volumes, such as George R.R. Martin’s Thrones’s Game, which
was split into three separate volumes, and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit, which
came out in two separate volumes. If the data are taken into a more detailed
examination, 75 items of children’s literature of various genres from
Anglophone countries were translated in 2000; 28 out of the 75 translations
belong to the fantasy genre, while titles dealing with emotional and family
issues came second with 11 items, and fairy tales occupied the third place with
nine translations. Another example can be seen from the 2004 publication
Table 1 The number of published translations of children’s fantasy fiction in Taiwan
Year of publication Number of translations published

1996 1
1997 5
1998 12
1999 8
2000 28
2001 25
2002 77
2003 81
2004 53
2005 26
2006 31
Total 347
figures. There were 154 titles of translated children’s literature of various

genres from Anglophone countries in 2004; 53 of these were translations of
fantasy, accounting for more than one third of the total, while fairy tales and
fiction with emotional and family topics came in second and third, with 26 and
21 titles, respectively. These figures show that fantasy is the single most active
system in the literary polysystem of translated children’s literature. The above
data therefore suggest that the flourishing of translation of children’s fantasy
fiction has helped the genre to occupy the central position in the literary
polysystem of translation of children’s literature in Taiwan, and consequently
the translational norms of this genre, and even of the translation of children’s
literature as a whole, must have been changed either at a micro- or
macrostructural level.
It was Toury (1978, 1995, 2000), a colleague of Even-Zohar, whose seminal
work on translational norms brought the notion into wider use. Toury’s theory
of translational norms scrutinises what translators do. Toury proposes three
classes of translational norms forming part of the translation process in terms
of their functions: the initial norm, preliminary norms and operational norms.
According to Toury (1995: 57), the initial norm determines whether
translations should incline towards source-text or target-text norms. The
choice between these two tendencies may be seen as the pursuit of

translation’s ‘adequacy’ or ‘acceptability’. The tendency toward adequacy or
acceptability should be understood as depending on the position of the literary
system in the literary polysystem. The conceived position of the literary
system of translation in a given culture at a particular time can determine
which translational tendency is used (i.e. whether it is oriented more towards
adequacy or acceptability). That is to say if a literary system holds the central
position, translators and other manipulators will be more willing to adopt
source repertories encompassing a source-oriented tendency and leading to an
adequacy-translation.
In terms of actually applied translational norms, Toury (1995: 5859)
distinguishes two kinds: preliminary and operational norms. Preliminary
norms govern the choice of texts to be translated and the directness of
translation, while operational norms deal with actual decision-making during
the translation process. The preliminary norms govern what kind of languages
or text-types should be chosen and translated to a given culture in a given
period of time. Operational norms arise during the actual process of
translation and determine which target language material is substituted for
the corresponding source language material; they govern the distributions of
certain linguistic elements; and they govern the manipulations of textual
segmentation. Toury (1995) stresses that the relation between preliminary and
operational norms is linked to the initial norm and that the three classes
intersect to determine whether a translation leans towards adequacy or
acceptability.
As mentioned above, the translation of children’s fantasy fiction in Taiwan
has in recent years occupied the central position in the literary polysystem of
children’s literature. As Even-Zohar (1990) states, once a literary system has
taken up the central position, translators would endeavour to bring in
innovative elements so as to ensure it does not petrify or retreat to a peripheral
position while other literary systems are more conservative and keep to the
established repertoire. If this statement is used to interpret the actual
application of operational norms at a microstructural level, it can be seen
that translation belonging to the centralised literary system may follow source
text norms with some modifications so that the final product is more
adequacy-oriented. In contrast, translations belonging to a peripheral literary
system may obey target text norms, or a compromise between the two, so that
the final product is more acceptability-oriented. This actually provides a
yardstick for an analysis of the general relation between the Harry Potter
translations and the polysystem of translated children’s fantasy fiction.
A Case Study of Harry Potter Translations

The following case study of strategies for translation of culture-specific
items in the first five Harry Potter translations is conducted in accordance with
the assumptions and concepts detailed above. Yet, owing to limits of space,
only culture-specific food and goods are presented and elaborated upon in this
paper. Translation strategies can be viewed as actual applications of opera-
tional norms by translators in the translation process. In Even-Zohar’s

polysystem theory, if a literary system assumes the central position, the
repertories of the system become more innovative and would be more
adequacy-oriented. This can build up a pre-assumption for the study that
new and exotic elements, namely foreign implantations, are embedded in the
Harry Potter translations. Thus, this study aims to examine whether and how
foreign implantations are created in the translations of the first five Harry
Potter books and to shed light on target readers’ responses to such implanta-
tions.
The first five Harry Potter books are listed below in chronological order:
(1) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (hereafter, ‘Stone’)

(2) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (hereafter, ‘Chamber’)
(3) Harry Potter and Prisoner of Azkaban (hereafter, ‘Azkaban’)
(4) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (hereafter, ‘Goblet’)
(5) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (hereafter, ‘Phoenix’)
The first translation within the Harry Potter series was published in 2000 and
the first four Harry Potter translations were translated by Ms Qianwen Peng
and published by Crown Press in Taiwan, while the ‘Phoenix’ was translated
by a group of translators including Ms Peng, in line with the Crown Press
publishing strategy.
As fantasy writers often adopt native mythology and employ particular
customs, religious beliefs and history of their own countries in their storylines,
it would seem a challenge for translators to deal with those cultural
specificities if source and target cultures are distinctly different. Davies
(2003), therefore, suggests a series of translation strategies for dealing with
culture-specific items: addition, omission, globalisation, localisation and preserva-
tion. These strategies will be discussed in what follows with examples taken
from the Harry Potter translations. It should be noted that not all of these
strategies are in fact used by the translators in this case study.
Microstructural level analysis of the culture-specific items

In translating the Harry Potter books, the culture-specific items, such as food
and goods, pose translating challenges for the translator, as the items in the
stories may lack equivalents in the target culture. It may be assumed that the
author of the source texts, J.K. Rowling, originally targeted British teenagers as
her audience and set the storyline around scenarios with which most of her
original target readers would be familiar. Viewed in this light, the definition of
culture-specific items in this study is interpreted as something that does not
exist in the target culture or for which target readers do not share the same
value as the source readers.
With each aspect of the discussion on the culture-specific food and goods, a
brief explanation of the applied translation strategies will be given.
Culture-specific items: Food

In the Harry Potter translations, translation strategies based on ‘preserva-
tion’ and ‘addition’ are used to deal with culture-specific item of ‘food’.
Translation strategy: Preservation. The ‘preservation’ strategy is used
when there is no close equivalent in the target culture; translators often have to
compromise by retaining the original source scripts in the translation.
Preservation can occur where the actual source text words are not preserved,
but where a cultural reference receives a literal translation, with no further
explanation.
Example 1:
ST: . . . he was ready to buy as many Mars Bars as he could carry . . . (Stone, p.
76)
TT: (He wanted to buy as many
planet Mars chocolate sticks as he could carry.) (p. 112)
Example 2:
ST: Harry was just helping himself to a jacket potato when . . . (Stone, p. 127)
TT: (When Harry was hurrying
to put a potato cooked in its skin on his food tray, . . .) (p. 181)
Example 3:
ST: . . . helping him to a Cornish pasty . . . (Goblet, p. 537)
TT: (stretched out hand to get a kang-wa-er
[Cornwall] stuffed pastry . . .) (p. 644)
The Mars Bar in Example 1 is a common brand of chocolate bar in Britain

made of chocolate-malt nougat topped with a layer of caramel and covered
with milk chocolate. The jacket potato in Example 2 is a traditional English
food: a baked potato served with the skin on; it can be served with a wide
variety of stuffing (such as cheese, salad or anything leftover from a previous

meal). The Cornish pasty of Example 3 developed from the simple diet of
Cornish people hundreds of years ago. Unfortunately, although British culture
is quite visible in the global context, it seems not to function well within the
target culture in these instances. None of the three foods has been imported or
introduced into Taiwan and therefore there are no equivalents in the target
culture. In Examples 1 and 2, the translator literally translated the Mars Bars
and jacket potato. Although the original source word ‘Cornish’ was not
preserved in the translation, Cornish pasty in Example 3 was translated with
its sound and meaning. All three examples indicate that their original source
flavours were all preserved to a certain degree. It may be assumed that the
translator either deliberately left the exotic flavour of the items and translated
them literally into the target texts where there were no equivalents in the target
culture, or intentionally introduced new source-culture elements into the
target texts by way of acculturation.
The ‘preservation’ strategy is often adopted in situations where the literary
system of the work under translation is at the centre of the literary polysystem.
Translators and manipulators of the centralised literary system make efforts to
bring in new elements, so as to make the system more innovative and avoid
petrifaction. Under such conditions, the translational norms in use tend to be

more adequacy-oriented, with the repertoires lying closer to the source
culture. Seen in this light, foreign implantations are embedded in translations
by preserving the source culture images and flavours.
Translation strategy: Preservationaddition. Another strategy used in
translating culture-specific items in Harry Potter translations is to employ a
mixture of translation strategy of ‘preservation’ and ‘addition’. Davies (2003:
77) argues that preserving of the Otherness of the source culture may lead to
obscurity; therefore, a translator may decide to keep the original items but
supplement the text with whatever information is judged necessary. The actual
application of such a strategy can be found in the use of footnotes, endnotes,
glossaries, parentheses, italics and so forth. The drawback of the adaptation of
‘addition’ is that additional information may hold up the narrative or burden
readers with irritating details.
Example 4:
ST: ‘What’s that?’ . . . ‘Bouillabaisse,’ said Hermione. (Goblet, p. 221)
TT: Bouillabaisse (‘What is
that?’ . . . ‘Bouillabaisse’ (Footnote: a Provencal fish soup), said Hermione.)
(p. 271)
In Example 4, ‘Bouillabaisse’ was preserved in its original script in the

translation and an additional explanatory footnote was provided to explain
the nature of the food. This scene is, in fact, intended by J.K. Rowling to imply
Hermione is very knowledgeable, as ordinary British children would not know
what bouillabaisse is unless they had actually been to Provence and eaten it. It
may be assumed that, in consideration of the target readers’ reading compre-
hension, a footnote was provided in the translation to explain what the food is.
The use of ‘preservation’ demonstrates the phenomena characteristic of a

literary system occupying the central position. In this situation, linguistic
repertoires tend to be adequacy-oriented; in other words, foreign implantation
occurs within the target texts. However, Toury (1995) also stresses that
attachment to extreme source-oriented or target-oriented norms is atypical
in translational practice. Translators would therefore tend to adopt more
moderate methods between the two extremes.
Culture-specific items: Goods
In addition to the foods discussed above, goods specific to Britain also
created challenges for the translators. In general, this study found two extreme
translation strategies for coping with them: ‘preservation’ and ‘localisation’.
Translation strategy: Preservation. As mentioned above, the utilisation
of ‘preservation’ can be the preservation of the source script or the literal
translation of the source item. It is more adequacy-oriented, mostly being used
when a literary system occupies the central position in the literary polysystem.
Example 5:
ST: Perhaps it had something to do with living in a dark cupboard . . . (Stone,
p. 20)
TT: (It is perhaps something to do
with living in a dark bowl-cabinet) (p. 33)
In the original texts, Harry Potter lived in a cupboard before he moved up to a

normal room in the home of his foster family, the Dursleys. In Britain,
‘cupboard’ usually refers to an item of furniture for storage or a built-in space
under the stairs. Yet there is no such furniture or architectural space in the
target culture and the term was rendered by preservation. This foreign
implantation occurs over and over in the first five translations. It may be
assumed that the translator either mistranslated the term owing to insufficient
cultural understanding or deliberately wanted to bring in a vivid image of
Harry being mistreated by his foster family. The translation of ‘ /bowl
cabinet’ might give target readers the impression that Harry has to squeeze
tightly into a bowl cabinet and live there. However, this rendition can still be
regarded as a foreign implantation that preserves its original literal meaning.
Translation strategy: Localisation. Apart from the strategy of ‘preserva-
tion’ adopted in coping with culture-specific items, the translation strategy of
‘localisation’ was found in the Harry Potter translations. The purpose of the
localisation strategy is to anchor a reference firmly in the culture of the target
audience (Davies, 2003: 84). In most cases, translators do not seek to effect a
total localisation of the whole literary work, but resort to this method for
individual culture-specific items.
Example 6:
ST: Sellotaped to the note was a fifty-pence piece. (Stone, p. 147)
TT: (The note had a five mao coin stuck to it
with transparent tape) (p. 208)
Example 7:
ST: At Dudley’s fifth birthday party, Aunt Marge had whacked Harry around
the shins with her walking stick to stop him beating Dudley at musical statues.
(Azkaban, p. 19)
TT:
(At Dudley’s fifth birthday party, Aunt Marge intentionally used her walking
stick to hit Harry’s shins while everyone was playing Da-feng-chui) (p. 37)
Examples 6 and 7 demonstrate the use of the ‘localisation’ strategy to rewrite

text referring to culture-specific items. In the UK, the minimum unit of money
is the penny and a hundred pence make up a pound sterling. In the source
text, the Dursleys gave Harry a fifty-pence coin as a Christmas gift. To
eliminate the foreign flavour, the translator deliberately used ‘localisation’ to
replace the source text item by one specific to the target culture. ‘ /mao’ was
the minimum unit of money in the target culture around 50 years ago and is no
longer used. In Example 7, ‘musical statues’, which is not played in the target
culture, is replaced by ‘Da-feng-chui’, a well known childhood game of the
target culture similar in concept to musical chairs. Preserving the original
flavour might have confused readers owing to their unfamiliarity with the
original game. The translator therefore adopted the strategy of ‘localisation’ to
assimilate the game to ‘ /Da-feng-chui’ and make the rendition more
reader-friendly.
Within the categories of ‘foods’ and ‘goods’, only the translation strategies
of preservation, localisation, and the combination of preservation and addition
are found in the present study. In the following section, the implications of the
findings will be explained.
Implications of the Results

The above examples show two extremes in translators’ behaviour at the
microstructural level: on the one hand, translators tend to be more adequacy-
oriented, which means that translation is adequate with respect to the source
text, while translators adhere to target repertoires, which means adopting a
more acceptability-oriented approach, on the other.
The first instance actually conforms to the main hypothesis of the literary
polysystem theory that if a literary system assumes the central position, it will
be more adequacy-oriented and its repertories will be canonised. Thus, it
comes as no surprise to see that, after the first Harry Potter translation came
onto the market, the publication of translations of children’s fantasy fiction
grew rapidly, amounting to 293 fantasy translations published after 2000 (see
Table 1). Yet, the second instance suggests a situation where the literary system
occupies a secondary position, and is more conservative and inclines to
already established target repertoires. This paradox within Taiwan’s literary
system of translation of children’s fantasy can actually be a good starting point

for reexamining Even-Zohar and Toury’s hypotheses.
Regrettably, owing to the present study’s limits of scope and space, a
comprehensive picture of the relation of Harry Potter translations to other
translations of children’s fantasy fiction, which might lead to a clearer
explanation of the aforementioned paradox, is out of reach. However, it may
be assumed that, owing to the centralised position of translation of children’s
fantasy fiction, translators are more or less willing to adopt more innovative
strategies to enable transcultural comprehension and introduce the hegemonic
Euro-American cultures to target readers. Yet, when translating children’s
literature, translators also need to take into account children’s interests,
demands, responses, knowledge and reading ability (Klingberg, 1986). There-
fore, it may be assumed that, even when a translated genre has achieved the
central position in the literary polysystem of children’s literature, translators
are still very cautious about the use of foreign implantation. In this light, the
critical issues impinging on children’s responses to foreign implantation are
their reading ability and imperfect understanding of other cultures.
Target Readers’ Responses to Foreign Implantation

In order to understand children’s acceptance of foreign implantations,
questionnaires were conducted with 15 Taiwanese young people between the
ages of 10 and 15. The questionnaires consisted of open-ended and closed-
ended questions. The closed-ended questions were used to evaluate the degree
of acceptance of the chosen target text examples, while the open-ended
questions were employed to gather information on the subjects’ opinions of
those examples. Each example was linked to a scale of 15, where 1 meant
‘least satisfactory’ and 5 meant ‘most satisfactory’. Table 2 shows the answers
of the questionnaire.
In Examples 1, 2, 3 and 5, where the strategy of preservation was adopted by
the translator, our target readers gave different responses. In Examples 1, 2 and
5, the degree of unacceptability surpasses that of acceptability. Eight and 13
out of 15 subjects showed their dissatisfaction with Examples 1 and 2,
respectively. For example, ‘jacket potato’ was translated literally into the target
language and most subjects mentioned that the image of a potato served with
its skin was not at all appetising. The same responses were forthcoming in
relation to the translation of ‘Mars bar’: some subjects thought that the
chocolate bar was produced on the planet Mars and should be as hard as rock.
However, although the translation of ‘Cornish Pasty’ was produced in line
with a ‘preservation’ strategy, it received more positive responses. It may be
assumed that, by preserving the original exotic flavour of the Cornish pasty,
the transliteration does not rely on a rigid image as is the case with the
previous examples.
In Example 4, the original script for of the source text item, ‘bouillabaisse’, is
preserved with an additional annotation, and this elicited very positive
Translating Children’s Fantasy Fiction

Table 2 Target readers’ responses toward the translation of culture-specific items: food and goods
Degree of satisfaction among readers

Number of readers
Examples Strategy 5: 4: 3: 2: 1:
Ex. 1 (Mars bar) Preservation 2 1 4 6 2
Ex. 2 (jacket potato) Preservation 2 4 9
Ex. 3 (Cornish pasty) Preservation 4 3 8
Ex. 4 (bouillabaisse) Preservation 1 9 5
Addition
Ex. 5 (cupboard) Preservation 1 2 7 5
Ex. 6 (50 pence) Localisation 9 6
Ex. 7 (musical statues) Localisation 10 5
103
responses from the subjects. In fact, 10 out of the 15 subjects thought the
additional information helpful for their understanding of the source text food.
In Examples 6 and 7, the source text items were translated as target-culture
specific items, and all of the subjects expressed their satisfaction with these two
examples. Strictly speaking, only the adoption of a ‘localisation’ translation
strategy is emblematic of an acceptability-oriented approach. The tendencies
characterising the translations show that the translators mainly used source
culture repertories; for instance, Examples 1, 2, 3 and 5. However, the readers’
responses imply that although translations with foreign implantations are more
adequacy-oriented, target readers did not find this approach acceptable.
Conclusion
This study describes the position of the translation of children’s fantasy
fiction in the literary polysystem of translated children’s literature in Taiwan
and demonstrates the relation between the genre as a whole and the Harry
Potter translations. It is shown that the genre occupies a central position in the
literary polysystem of translated children’s literature, and its system and
repertories tend to be more adequacy-oriented. However, with the examina-

tion of target readers’ responses, it can be seen that this tendency does not
function well in practice. This raises another question as to whether readers’
responses can reconstruct the translational norms used in the translation
activities. Readers’ responses directly affect the marketability of the literary
genre and impact directly on the position of the literary system; once the
position of a (sub)system in a literary polysystem has changed, its translational
norms may also change. This is exactly why Even-Zohar stresses that literary
systems are not static but are constantly fighting with each other to enter the
centre of the literary polysystem, and why Toury claims that translational
norms are unstable.
Primary sources, all authored by J.K. Rowling:

(1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. London: Bloomsbury.
(2000) [Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone] (Q. Peng,
trans.) Taipei: Crown Culture Corporation.
(1998) Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. London: Bloomsbury.
(2000) [Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets] (Q. Peng,
trans.) Taipei: Crown Culture Corporation.
(1999) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. London: Bloomsbury.
(2001) [Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban] (Q.
Peng, trans.) Taipei: Crown Culture Corporation.
(2000) Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. London: Bloomsbury.
(2001) [Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire] (Q. Peng, trans.)
Taipei: Crown Culture Corporation.
(2003) Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. London: Bloomsbury.
(2004) [Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix] (Crown
Culture Corporation Translation Group, trans.) Taipei: Crown Culture
Corporation.
Correspondence
Any correspondence should be directed to Wen-chun Liang, School of
Modern Languages, University of Newcastle, Newcastle, UK (w.liang@
btopenworld.com).
References
Bassnett, S. and Lefevere, A. (1998) Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation.
Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.
Chen, H. (2003) The publishing of translation of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Economic Daily News
Davies, E. (2003) A goblin or a dirty nose? The treatment of culture-specific references
in translations of the Harry Potter book. The Translator 9 (1), 65100.
Even-Zohar, I. (1978) Papers in historical poetics. In B. Hrushovski and I. Even-Zohar
(eds) Papers on Poetics and Semiotics 8. Tel Aviv: University Publishing Projects.
Even-Zohar, I. (1990) Polysystem studies. Poetics Today 11 (1).
Klingberg, G. (1986) Children’s Fiction in the Hands of the Translators. Sweden: Bloms
Boktryckeri AB.
Manlove, C. (1975) Modern Fantasy: Five Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Toury, G. (1978) The nature and role of norms in literary translation. In J. Holmes, J.
Lambert and R.C.D. Broeck (eds) Literature and Translation: New Perspectives in
Literary Studies. Leuven: ACCO.

Toury, G. (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Toury, G. (2000) The nature and role of norms in translation. In L. Venuti (ed.) The
Translation Studies Reader. London: Routledge.

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