THE STATUS OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN CROATIAN TRANSLATIONS OF CHILDREN’S CLASSICS

Abstract

THE STATUS OF ILLUSTRATIONS IN CROATIAN TRANSLATIONS OF CHILDREN’S CLASSICS The paper presents a study of the visual discourses of Croatian editions of children’s classics translated from English into Croatian. It focuses on trends in using the original illustrations from the source texts or providing new illustrations in individual publications of target texts and on finding and interpreting semantic shifts in images provided by Croatian artists, in comparison with the illustrations in the first editions of the source texts. Interlingual translators adopt various strategies to cope with cultural and stylistic aspects of the source texts, and semantic shifts are almost inevitable. They are even more often perceived in translations of children’s literature. Children’s books regularly include intersemiotic translations of the verbal text in the form of images, which carry important narrative and cultural meanings. These may become fragile in translation. The analysis of images in Croatian publications with new sets of illustrations has detected modifications of original narrative meanings, leading to semantic shifts. Further, the analysis of the publishing practices has revealed a tendency in the recent period towards introducing new sets of illustrations more often than prior to the 1990s. Finally, the paper considers the reasons for and implications of these findings.