Writing and Translating ‘Aloud’:
A Case Study on Reading-Aloud Children’s Literature
Abstract
In recent years, a growing interest has been devoted to literature, either written or translated for children, and the specificities of this literature. The present study was an attempt to explore one of the main characteristics of children’s literature called reading aloud. Reading aloud refers to reading a story aloud to children in order to enhance their experience with education and entertainment through literature. Adopting a qualitative design, this study focused on analyzing reading aloud in one of Roald Dahl’s famous stories called “Fantastic Mr. Fox” (1996) and its translation by Mahboobeh Najafkhani through a model proposed by Cay Dollerup (2003). The model explores four different layers (structural, linguistic, content, and intentional layer) to establish if the text is suitable for reading aloud or not. The four layers were investigated in both the authored and translated text and similarities and differences in each layer were established and compared in order to examine if the translation is as or more/less suitable for reading aloud than the authored text. Out of the four layers, only the linguistic layer yielded some discrepancies. However, the results obtained from the statistical analysis of the linguistic layer indicated that the translation is as suitable as the source text in the case of reading aloud. The upshot of the finding was that reading aloud is not a negligible aspect of literature written for young audiences, and translators can utilize creative solutions in order to make the translation as fit as the source text for reading aloud.
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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).
