The role of childhood nostalgia in the reception of translated children’s literature

Abstract

This article explores how childhood nostalgia influences the reception of translations, specifically in the case of the (re)translation of E. B. White’s children’s book, Charlotte’s Web (1952). I concentrate on two translations – one by Xin Kang (White 1979) and the other by Rongrong Ren (White 2004). The theoretical framework complements existing reception research with theories of nostalgia, collective memory, and cultural memory. A qualitative analysis of reader posts on social media sites shows that a group of adult readers prefer Kang’s translation because they read it as children and feel a nostalgic attachment to it. This nostalgia expresses itself in three ways: (1) Kang’s version, as a memory trigger, connects adults to their childhood, (2) sharing digitized versions of Kang’s translation and the online sale of its hardcover version creates nostalgic online communities based on a collective memory, and (3) Kang’s version is considered a classic that should, as a kind of cultural memory, be passed on to the next generation. In this article, I argue that childhood nostalgia, an often ignored extratextual factor, influences adult reception of translated children’s literature. I thus offer a new perspective on translation reception and the ‘aging’ issue in studies of retranslation.