Translating children literature: a Bermanian analysis of the Turkish translation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol

Translation of children literature can be considered a newly emerging and developing sub-field oftranslation studies. The systematic inquiry into translation strategies that can be applied in theprocess of translating children books seems to have got underway recently. Many scholars such asRiitta Oittinen, Tiina Puurtinen, Zohar Shavit, and Göte Klingberg have provided their own insightsabout what sort of challenges await a translator of children literature considering that his/her targetreaders are children. Perhaps the most prominent challenge is to tailor the target text as to theneeds, expectations, knowledge, and limited experiences of children. In this light, the presentresearch intends to make a textual analysis for the translation of Charles Dickens’s novella AChristmas Carol which was translated from English into Turkish without abridgment and from itsoriginal language by Çiçek Eriş in 2010 through the approach of Negative Analytic (1985) developedby Antoine Berman. Accordingly, this study argues that Berman’s approach may be offered as amethodological framework for the translation of children literature. In order to problematize thisargument, twelve examples selected from the source and target texts have been elucidated by meansof the deforming tendencies of Berman and they have been critically discussed from the perspectiveof children literature. The findings obtained from the analysis have revealed that Berman’s NegativeAnalytic partly fills the lack of methodological rigour in this sub-field and it would provideappropriate tools to investigate and evaluate the strategies used in translating children literature ina systematic and comprehensive way.Keywords: Translation of children literature