Ethical Mediation and Evaluative Intensification in Persian Children’s Literature Translation
Abstract
Children’s literature is often translated within strong pedagogical and cultural expectations, yet we still know relatively little about how translators shape the ethical tone of a story through everyday linguistic choices. This article examines how translator agency operates as a form of ethical mediation in the Persian translation of Jeff Brumbeau’s The Quiltmaker’s Gift (2000), translated by Ferydoun Faryad (2004). Drawing on virtue-oriented translation ethics and Appraisal Theory, the study conducts a qualitative close comparison of selected source and target passages in order to trace shifts in evaluative language. The analysis identifies five recurring strategies of ethical intensification—affective dramatization, emotional interiorization, sensory magnification, lexical compassion, and cosmological enlargement—through which the Persian translation foregrounds moral and emotional cues with greater perceptual vividness. These shifts systematically strengthen resources of Affect, Judgement, and Appreciation while leaving the narrative structure unchanged. The article argues that such micro-level adjustments function as a form of ethical mediation, aligning evaluative meanings with culturally familiar ethical discourse. By proposing a framework for observing these shifts, the study contributes to ongoing discussions of translator ethics and suggests that domestication in children’s literature may operate through subtle evaluative reshaping rather than overt ideological rewriting.
Keywords:
Appraisal Theory, Children’s literature translation, Ethical intensification, Ethical mediation, Moral indexing, Translator agencyReferences
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Copyright (c) 2026 Mahdi Vahedikia
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Copyright Licensee: Iranian Journal of Translation Studies. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0 license).
