1,720,973 research outputs found
Gianni Rodari and his English Readers
No full textChildren’s literature, in its multidisciplinary nature, offers a wealth of research options that span from psychology, to education, to translation. In this book, Alborghetti looks into the potential of children’s literature to promote empathy in young readers, and especially delves into the narrative dialogue among author, translator, and target reader. The author explores the literary and translation contexts in the United States and the United Kingdom, before presenting the case study of Gianni Rodari’s Italian works translated into English, and their relevance in the debate around the power of children’s literature in these Anglophone countries. This book is useful for researchers, educators and professional translators who wish to explore the world of children’s literature in translation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
The ‘easy’ task of translating for children. The translator’s responsibility and the pedagogical nature of translated children’s literature
No full textTranslated children’s literature has only recently found scholars that investigated the relationship between translators and young readers, translations as cultural and social products of specific historical periods, the pedagogical nature of translation addressing a young audience, the strategies adopted to make literary works travel among cultures.
Translation, much as literature itself, is never performed in isolation: the translator is a human being that grew up within a specific culture, who occupies a privileged position when translating works written for a young public because s/he is at the same time an ideal reader and the writer of the target text (Lathey, 2010; O’Sullivan, 2005; Shavit, 1986; Klingberg, 1986). The apparently easy task of translation is invested with responsibility for the translator who needs to keep the original author and the receiving audience (adults and children) in mind (Nord, 1991). But if we consider children’s literature as the possibility for young readers to create their own image of the world and reflect on their identity, translation can also foster the potential of a dialogue among translators and readers through the book.
The aim of this paper is to review academic studies in the field of translated children’s literature, focussing on the open dialogue between translators and young readers. This invisible thread can suggest new research areas in children’s literature that can bring this discipline at the centre of academic debate around the pedagogical nature of translation in the growth of passionate and curious readers
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Full text linkWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Lewis Carroll’s The Nursery Alice in Translation: A Time-based Exploration of a New Reading Paradigm for Young Children in Italy
No full textLewis Carroll’s The Nursery Alice (1890), a rewriting of the well-known Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), is a remarkable anticipation of reading interaction between adults and children “aged from Nought to Five”, as the author wrote in his preface to the book. Recent research focused on the alternate fortune of The Nursery Alice and emphasised the time span in which the idea for this book developed in Carroll’s literary projects. Carroll conceived a text that maintained only a superficial resemblance with its “elder sister” and interrogated a dual audience of adults (the actual readers) and children (the receptors) on the illustrations
scattered throughout the book. The preponderance of the colourized illustrations over the text, as well as the ways in which the narrator invites the audience to use the book, anticipate the modern conception of books as physical tools to introduce very young children to a positive attitude towards reading. The Nursery Alice soon went out of print and many years passed until a new reprint reappeared on the market in the mid-20th century. In Italy, this book took longer to be translated and published in two distinct versions with new illustrations and translations in 1992 and 2017. This paper wishes to explore the reasons behind these translations based on the cultural approach to translation as an indicator of social, economic and political shifts offered by Bassett and Lefevere, tracing a timeline in the educational evolution that had to occur in Italy in order to
produce them. Alice dei bambini first and Alice dei piccoli later, reflect the recent pedagogical approach to “emergent literacy” as an opportunity to study the developmental attitude of pre-readers towards reading material and their relationship with competent adults. As stated by Chartier, quality children’s literature is meant to initiate young readers to savour “slow reading”, encouraging constant re-reading. Therefore, a reading canon of classics seems to support this role of “cultural initiator” to prepare young readers to more complex texts. In Italy, this initiation process started around the end of the 20th century, and a growing awareness of the importance of early literacy in more recent years has prompted adults as mediators to produce, disseminate, buy (or lend), read books and interact with pre-readers using a wide variety of sources. To this end, small, independent publishing houses promoted series specifically designed to introduce rewritings of classics to a dual audience, as is the case for the two translations mentioned. The paratextual material is indicative of the diffusion and reception network intended for these volumes. From a textual point of view, the translations show a distinct shift in the intended audience: in Alice dei bambini the narrator speaks to a group of people, in Alice dei piccoli it addresses a single reader. This is only one of the numerous instances of adaptation that suggest how a change in the conception of the development of very young children’s reading skills promoted the creation of a new literary vision of The Nursery Alice
Translating for Children: Responsibility, Dialogue and the Role of the Translator
No full textTranslators occupy a privileged position when translating works written for a young audience as they are simultaneously ideal readers and authors of the target texts. The apparently easy task of translating children’s literature relies on the translator’s responsibility to keep the author of the source text and the readership in mind. If we consider children’s literature as an opportunity for young readers to shape their own image of the world and –
with reference to youth literature – reflect on their identity, translations can nurture a silent dialogue between the reader and the book during reading. This paper outlines the position of children’s literature in academia and the
shared multidisciplinary dimension with translation in order to discuss the value of translations and the role of translators as responsible for nurturing a narrative dialogue with young readers
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