Workshops

For a long time, both the study of translation and the study of children’s literature held marginal positions in the field of literary studies. The intersection of these two – the study of the translation of children’s literature – is therefore not a very old one. In the last decades, however, a growing group of scholars has developed concepts, theories, and questions that have set the agenda for this academic field.

In this introductory workshop, we will use Jessica Love’s picturebook Julián is a Mermaid (2018) as a case study in order to explore some of the key questions in the study of children’s literature in translation. We will explore some fundamental translation strategies, discuss the specific challenges when translating multimodal texts, and discuss how international translation flows impact translation choices.

Required reading

- Love, Jessica. Julián is a Mermaid. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2018.

Note: this picturebook has been translated into fourteen languages. You may chose any of these versions of the text as your preparatory reading.

- Alvstad, Cecilia. ‘Children’s Literature’. The Routledge Handbook of Literary Translation. Eds. Kelly Washbourne & Ben Van Wyke. New York: Routledge, 2019. 159-180.

Suggested reading

- Heilbron, Johan. ‘Towards a Sociology of Translation’. European Journal of Social Theory, 1999, 2.4, 429-44.

- Kotze, Haidee & Sonali Kulkarni. “The translation of children's literature in postcolonial contexts”, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Young Audiences. Eds. Michal Borodo & Jorge Díaz Cintas. New York: Routledge, 2025. 76-90.

- O’Sullivan, Emer. “More than the sum of its parts? Synergy and picturebook translation”. Écrire et traduire pour les enfants: voix, images et mots = Writing and translating for children : voices, images and texts. Eds. Elena Di Giovanni, Chiara Elefante & Roberta Pederzoliy. Lausanne: Peter Lang, 2010. 133-148.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Choose a country or language region. This can be your own country or language region, or another one that interests you. Look for information about the translation flows in your chosen region. Try to answer some of the following questions:

- How often are books from your region translated into other languages or contexts?

- How often are books from other languages or contexts translated into your chosen region?

- What is the share of translated books to/from this language?

- Is there a difference in the kinds of books that are included in these flows (e.g. children’s literature v adult literature, fictional books v non-fictional books, books on certain themes, by certain authors, by certain (specialized publishers, etc.)

Note: it is very unlikely that you will be able to (partially) answer all of these questions. This is not the point of this assignment. Do some detective work and see what information you can find related to your chosen region.

Suggested resources include: 

- UNESCO’s Index Translationum (https://www.unesco.org/xtrans/bsform.aspx)

- the Digital Opinions on Translated Literature (DIOPTRA-L) database (https://ianalyzer.hum.uu.nl/search/goodreads?tab=visualizations&visualize=resultscount&visualizedField=book_genre)​

- websites of institutions that regulate and promote translations, websites of publishing houses.

Write a report of your findings of no more than 1 page, in which you interpret your main findings based on the ideas discussed in our workshop and/or discussed in the required and suggested readings. Send your report to s.e.vdrbeek@tilburguniversity.edu before July 12th.

2025 marked the 160 StartFragment ^th anniversary of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has been translated into over 170 languages. Translation, a form of rereading and rewriting, is a complex negotiation between two cultures. This workshop will use selected back-translations of passages from ‘A Mad Tea-Party’ published in Alice in a World of Wonderlands; The Translations of Lewis Carroll's Masterpiece (2015) to think through questions such as 1) what has been translated? 2) when was it translated and how? 3) why was it translated in this way? 4) How do the translators deal with the word play, puns, poetry, parodied verses, jokes which involve logic, cultural and historical references in the book? We will explore factors must be taken into consideration in the process of translation, such as gender, colonialism, globalization, and other cultural and political issues.

Required reading list

Primary sources

Selected back translations from Alice in a world of wonderlands; the translations of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Vols 1-2, ed. J.A. Lindseth, Oak Knoll Press. (available on Blackboard)

Secondary source

O'Sullivan E 2005, ‘Children's Literature in Translation', Comparative Children's Literature, Routledge, pp. 72-103.

Recommended reading list

O'Sullivan E 2015, ‘Miss Zimmerman and Her Successors: German Versions of Alice in Wonderland’, Alice in a world of wonderlands; the translations of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Vol 1., ed. J.A. Lindseth, Oak Knoll Press, pp. 259-269.

Satpathy S & Kumar L 2015, 'Alice in Hindi: A dour tradition of nonsense', Alice in a world of wonderlands; the translations of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Vol 1., ed. J.A. Lindseth, Oak Knoll Press, pp. 289-293. 

Sewell, BW 2015, 'Alitiji in the Pitjantjatjara dreamtime: Alitjinya Ngura Tjukurtjarangka', Alice in a world of wonderlands; the translations of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Vol 1., ed. J.A. Lindseth, Oak Knoll Press, pp. 447-448. 

Sheppard, N 2015, 'The Pitjantjatjara Alice: An Aboriginal language of Australia', Alice in a world of wonderlands; the translations of Lewis Carroll's masterpiece, Vol 1., ed. J.A. Lindseth, Oak Knoll Press, pp. 445-446. 

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits 

Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been translated into hundreds of languages, each posing unique challenges due to its wordplay, cultural references, and nonsensical elements. Analyze how translators have approached these challenges in at least two different cultural or linguistic contexts (500-700 words). How do the translators’ choices reflect their cultural and linguistic norms? What is gained or lost in each version? Submit the essay to sue.chen@deakin.edu.au by 1 July 2026.  

Translation aims to make the foreign familiar to its target audience through interlingual rendition. But what happens when a literary text deliberately incorporates strangeness as a misfit within its storyworld to create a surprise effect? How can the strange, the curious, the bizarre, the absurd, or the nonsensical be translated in a way that renders it comprehensible while preserving its radical otherness and singular difference? This challenge is heightened by the fact that the notion of strangeness is a historically and culturally shifting concept, yet one that remains rooted in the timeless patterns of Jungian archetypes and the tradition of the grotesque. The representation of strangeness provokes cognitive dissonance, affective ambiguity, and a curious fusion of fear and fascination—often culminating in a sense of disorientation and perplexed laughter. Since the translator’s task is to reproduce the comic effect, the workshop aims to explore how humor theories—Freud’s psychoanalytical understanding of jokes, Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque, Bergson’s reflections on theatrical laughter, and feminist or queer theories on the political potential of parody—may assist in translating strangeness. Strategies may include domestication or foreignization, shifts to poetic registers, and playful manipulation through the proliferation or depletion of meanings. We will focus on selected texts by Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl to trace instances of strangeness and examine creative ways of adapting them across languages, cultures, and media. Participants will address a wide range of topics, including the visual translation of strangeness, imagological perspectives, the interplay of stereotypes and neologisms, the ethics of translation in light of political correctness, and the commodification of the funcanny.

Reading List 

Please read one novel and at least one picturebook from the list:

Dr. Seuss. The Cat in the Hat (Houghton Mifflin, 1957) https://share.google/ZoqKV3b1Y3pDpZOk4

Dr. Seuss. Fox in Sock (Random House, 1965) or Green Eggs and Ham (Random House, 1960) https://share.google/GhCXc4C7pWhyDegh9 https://pubhtml5.com/hmeo/tmgm/Green_Eggs_and_Ham/

Dr. Seuss. The Lorax (Random House, 1971) https://share.google/lSgkyZsqkqVLGbXUJ

Roald Dahl. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Puffin, 1964) or THE BFG (Jonathan Cape, 1982) https://share.google/JqAWfD0H0S2F8ZykM https://share.google/wgplum7HwFM0k3s7V

Preparatory Tasks for all Students

1.Where Does the Laughter Come From?

Choose a passage from either a Dr. Seuss or a Roald Dahl text from the list of assigned readings. Briefly annotate what makes the passage funny (acoustics, neologisms, grotesque imagery, power reversal, taboo-breaking…) and what kind of strangeness it produces (absurd, uncanny, carnivalesque, grotesque, infantile, aggressive, etc.). Consider whether the humour is primarily linguistic, visual, cultural, or affective.

2. Translating the Untranslatable? Select a memorable instance of strangeness or humour from your own country’s children’s literature that is culturally or linguistically specific and poses a challenge for translators due to its unfamiliarity for target-language audiences. (You may also bring a copy of the book and share illustrations that demonstrate visual conceptualisations of the strange or comic that fail to cross cultures.)

Try translating a short humorous passage from Seuss or Dahl into another language, and reflect on what cannot be translated, which translation strategies you employed, and what kinds of loss or gain occurred. Consider creating two versions: a child-oriented version and an adult-aware version (more ironic or darker in tone). Select a neologism and invent alternative renderings in another language; experiment with sound-based, meaning-based, and grotesque or nonsensical solutions.

3. Visual Strangeness, Multimodal Awareness, Intersemiotic Translation Select an illustration from a Dr. Seuss or Roald Dahl book and analyse how it contributes to the strange or comic effect. Does the image guide or restrict translation? Would the humour survive if either the text or the image were radically altered? How are meanings modified when comparing the original illustration with those in translated editions or stills from film adaptations?

4. Ethics and Laughter Identify a moment in a Seuss or Dahl text that feels cruel, politically incorrect, stereotyping, or ethically troubling from a contemporary perspective. Were there instances in which you laughed but felt uneasy? Why was the passage funny at the time of its publication, and why might it feel uncomfortable today? Should translation soften, intensify, or preserve such discomfort? Can humour align with political correctness while preserving its satirical critical edge, can it remain provocatively playful without reproducing marginalisation? How to shift the focus from censorhip to self-reflective interpretive awareness? What is the difference between laughing at vs. laughing with others?

Additional Tasks for Students taking credits

Read Jan Van Coillie’s “Cultural Specificity in Translated Children’s Literature” and write a 500–700-word essay discussing an instance of strangeness and the challenges it poses for translators in a work of children’s literature of your choice. Submit your assignment as a Word document to akerchy@gmail.com no later than 20 July 2026. Please use the subject line: “CL Summer School: Languages of Laughter.”

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Informational – or non-fiction – picturebooks, flooding the international book market, usually stay on the margins of children’s literature translation studies. Only recently has more attention been given to this topic by Michał Borodo in his chapter “The Translation of Non-Fiction Information Books for Young Readers” from The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Young Audiences (2025). This workshop is driven by Borodo’s notion that “non‑fiction opens fresh and inspiring research questions [which] may concern the issues of ideology, socio-cultural norms, different notions of education, discrepant methods of communicating knowledge, as well as the interplay between the verbal and the visual” (2025: 350).

This workshop aims to discuss translation tendencies in informational picturebooks. We will begin by discussing the theoretical background, key issues, challenges, and potentially controversial thematic areas (Borodo). Next, we will delve into a comparative analysis of selected translations of informational picturebooks on history and geography by Flemish and Polish authors: Tijdlijn [Timeline] and Rivieren [Rivers] by Peter Goes, and Mapy [Maps] by Aleksandra Mizielińska & Daniel Mizieliński (also known as Aleksandra & Daniel Mizielińscy). As a result, participants will gain heightened awareness of translating informational picturebooks as a complex, ideologically driven process. They will also learn more about informational picturebooks from the countries of origin of the Children’s Literature Summer School (Flanders) and one of its lecturers (Poland).

Required reading list

Borodo, Michał. ‘The Translation of Non-Fiction Information Books for Young Readers’. The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Young Audiences. Eds. Michał Borodo & Jorge Díaz-Cintas. New York: Routledge, 2025. 349–360. (Available on Blackboard)

Review of one of the translations of picturebooks by Peter Goes (Tijdlijn [Timeline], Rivieren [Rivers]) or Aleksandra & Daniel Mizieliński (Mapy [Maps]) into your language or published in your country. You may consult WorldCat or your national/local library catalogues for reference. Bring the review in any form (pictures, screenshots, links) to the classroom. If none of these picturebooks were translated into your language, find a review of a translation into another language of your choice.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read Michał Borodo’s essay focusing on key concepts and issues in the field of translating informational (picture)books for children and reflect on how it is relevant to your ongoing research or professional/personal experience. Next, verify whether picturebooks by Peter Goes (Tijdlijn [Timeline], Rivieren [Rivers]) or Aleksandra & Daniel Mizielińscy (Mapy [Maps]) were translated into your language or published in your country. If so, find the review of one of these translations and read it with a focus on the reviewer’s view on the translation of the picturebook from the source language/culture into the target language/culture. Come to the workshop with the review in any form (pictures, screenshots, links). If none of these picturebooks were translated into your language, find a review of a translation into another language of your choice.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits 

Referring to Borodo’s essay, analyse the reception of a selected translation of an informational picturebook about the history or geography into your language or published in your country (it may be one of Goes’s or Mizielińscy’s picturebooks, but it may also be any informational picturebooks of your choice). If possible, refer to fragments of the source text available online. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include as many images as you like. After attending the class, please send the Doc, Docx or Pages file to km.rybak@uw.edu.pl before July 12^th.

As an emerging multimodal genre in children’s literature, graphic novels have become increasingly popular because of their pronounced aesthetic features and educational functions to young readers. However, when crossing national borders, graphic novels have posed serious challenges to translators since the cultural contexts in the source texts are not easy to incorporate by the cognitive frames of the target readers. To investigate how translations remove linguistic, cultural, and cognitive barriers and develop more inclusive children’s literature in the global market, we apply a case study of My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder, the English translation of a well-read Chinese graphic novel (老街的童话).

This workshop is designed to examine how children’s literature needs to be recontextualized to address the cultural gaps when it crosses national and cultural borders. With the examples chosen, we aim to explore how adequate recontextualization promotes the reception of the source text in the target culture and why translators need to recontextualize the multimodal text to weave a web of meanings by synergizing the message in the written text and the semiotic background of pictures for its recipients in different cultures. Analyzing the target text based on Van Leeuwen and Wodak’s typology of transformation and other theories of translation studies, we discuss the strategies, such as conservation, reorganization, substitution, and addition, used in the recontextualization of graphic novels to produce a desired reception by the target audience.

As a result, participants will acquire knowledge and inspirations on the translation of graphic novels to cross national and cultural borders from a multimodal perspective. They will also learn more about the cultural genes of the graphic novel from its country of origin (China) and its adaptations in its target languages.

Required Reading List

Tian, Chuanmao, Xu Wang, and Mingwu Xu. ‘Historico-Cultural Recontextualization in Translating Ancient Classics: A Case Study of Gopal Sukhu’s The Songs Of Chu’. Perspectives 30.2 (2022): 181-194.

Review of the English translation (Gauvin, Edward.trans. My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder. Minnesota: Graphic Universe, 2018) of the Chinese graphic novel Laojie de Tonghua by Nie Jun and read the English translation of the graphic novel if possible. Bring the review and any interesting questions from you to the classroom.

Preparatory task for all participants

Read the coauthored article by Chuanmao Tian, Wang Xu and Mingwu Xu, focusing on the working definition of recontextualization, its analytical framework and its strategies and reflect on how it is relevant to your research of the translation of multimodal texts such as graphic novels or picturebooks. Next, compare the definition of recontextualization and its analytical framework in this article to your research of the translation of multimodal texts for children and explore a feasible approach to recontextualize the text in its target language. Then, prepare your questions or puzzles in understanding the translated text and explore the ways to address these gaps in understanding.

Assignment for students taking ECTS credits

Investigate how strategies of recontextualization could help to facilitate the understanding of the source text and reflect on whether the adaptation strategies might undermine the cultural authenticity of the original and thus produce false impressions or misunderstandings. You are encouraged to explore further whether or how a balance could be stricken between protecting the cultural authenticity of the original and reproducing a highly understandable text for the target audience. The text should not exceed 700 words, but feel free to include as many images as you like. After attending the class, please send the Doc or Docx file to xuderong@ouc.edu.cn before July 12th.

Children’s literature is often playful, punny and packed with cultural nuance – and these are precisely the qualities that can make it challenging to translate. Some words, puns, rhymes, concepts and playful turns of phrase in children’s books are impossible to carry across from one language to another. Or are they?

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll explore some “impossible” moments and experiment with creative ways to bring them to life for new readers.

Preparatory task for all participants

Please bring along an “impossible” example or two from your own languages and reading experiences: a whole story, a picture book, a concept, a short passage, a pun, a rhyme or a playful moment from a children’s book that you think might resist translation. We’ll tackle these challenges, discussing strategies and discovering how imagination, collaboration and a dash of daring might be able to transform those tricky texts.

No translation experience is required, and all language combinations are welcome. The workshop will offer a practical introduction to the craft of children’s literature translation, highlighting the joys, surprises and inventive problem-solving that make it so much fun.