This chapter gives a general introduction of the thesis. Accordingly, this chapter presents the research motives and the research questions, briefly provides a framework of how the research will be conducted, and summarizes the analyses,
findings, and argument of the research. Finally, the structure of the thesis is presented in the last section.
1.1. Motives
Over 90% of the picture storybooks published in Taiwan in recent years have been translated texts. According to the Dandelion Reading Promotion Foundation (2015), only 82 pictures storybooks published in 2015 were by Taiwan illustrators and writers. Of these 82 works, eight were republications. 82 is the highest annual number of such publications since 2011. However, this number of publications still occupies less than 10% of all the published picture storybooks; in other words, 90% of picture storybooks are translations. With so many translated picture storybooks on the market, young readers – and the typical reader of a picture storybook is young – are likely to read translated picture storybook. The quality of the translation might well have an impact on them. Therefore, the translation of picture storybooks deserves attention.
The translation of picture storybooks does not only deal with words; the pictures should be carefully considered as well. Since picture storybooks tell stories through the collaboration between pictures and words, this verbal-visual interplay makes the translation process more complex (O’Sullivan, 1998). Translating a picture storybook is translating the totality created by the pictures and the words, although the pictures
remain unchanged in the translation (Oittinen, 2003). Therefore, how a translator understands and deals with the verbal-visual interaction in a picture storybook greatly influences the quality of the translation, and the reader’s understanding and
interpretation of the translated picture storybook.
Moreover, since pictures do not change in translated picture storybooks, people might think that the word-picture relationship in the translation remains the same as in the source text (Oittinen, 2003). However, researchers, for example, O’Sullivan (1998), Oittinen (2003), Rankin (2006), and Van Meerbergen (2009), who have conducted case studies of picture storybooks originally written in European languages and translated into English or vice versa, or other combinations of European languages, have found that the word-picture relationship does change in translated picture
storybooks. Compared with the research mentioned above, the study of the word-picture dynamics in word-picture storybooks translated into Chinese in Taiwan is sparse at best and deserves more attention.
In Taiwan, research on picture storybooks translated into Chinese mainly concerns the translation of “text” in a traditional sense – namely, printed words, and focuses on analyzing translation strategy, stylistic differences in different translation versions, cultural issues and so forth (Lin, 2008; Ho, 2009; Lin, 2010; Chai, 2015).
Scholars have examined the word-picture relationship, but have concentrated narrowly on whether the information in the translated text matches what is shown in the pictures (Lu, 2000; Chen, 2003; Ku, 2008; Liu, 2012). There are few studies concern the change in the word-picture relationship in Chinese translation of picture storybooks in Taiwan ( Yang, 2008; Yang & Yang, 2011), but how those studies were conducted and how their conclusions were drawn leave much to be desired. In a word, word-picture relationship in Chinese translated picture storybook is a particular area of research that
remains relatively uninvestigated and has ample avenues for research. The present thesis is therefore conceived to further investigate the word-picture relationship in picture storybooks translated from English to Chinese, and endeavors to uncover further insights into the Chinese translation of picture storybooks and understanding of the word-picture relationship in picture storybooks, and to bring the issue to academic attention and inspire more research on this area.
1.2. Research Questions, Method and General Findings and Analysis The research addresses the following three research questions:
(1) How does the translation change the word-picture relationship?
(2) What are the effects caused by the change in the word-picture relationship?
(3) What are the possible reasons for the translators to translate the verbal text in these ways that cause the change in the word-picture relationship?
To answer these questions, the thesis conducted a comparative and textual analysis of the Chinese translations of five award-winning and popular picture storybook series and their original English texts that remain popular to date. They include: Maurice Sendak’s trilogy, Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There; Harry the Dog series written by Gene Zion and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham, Harry the Dirty Dog, Harry by the Sea, and No Roses for Harry, Little Bear series written by Else Holmelund Minarik and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, containing Little Bear, Father Bear Comes Home, Little Bear's Friend, Little Bear's Visit, and A Kiss for Little Bear, Anthony Browne’s White Bear with a Magic Pencil series, Bear Hunt, Bear Goes to Town, The Little Bear Book, and A Bear-y Tale, and Ian Falconer’s Olivia the Pig series, Olivia, Olivia Saves the Circus, Olivia...and the Missing Toy, Olivia Forms a Band, and Olivia and the Fairy Princesses.
The research reviewed existing taxonomies of word-picture relationships for picture storybooks, identified their strengths and weaknesses, and utilized their strengths in terms of how they name and describe various word-picture interplay, to examine the word-picture interaction in the five picture storybooks series. Secondly, the research documented the changes in the verbal-visual relationship detected in the Chinese translations of picture storybooks, and observed the features of each change.
Changes with similar features were categorized into different groups, and were analyzed in terms of possible causes and effects. The research found that the verbal-visual relationship changes when translators make visual information explicit in the translation, and the translation approach is described as explicitation. Moreover, explicitation in the verbal translation is found when the word-picture relationships in the corresponding source texts are: (1) pictures clarifying words and (2) pictures elaborating words. The notion of clarifying and elaborating relationship are adopted from existing classifications of the word-picture relationship with slight revision, which will be explained in more detail in the chapter of literature review and methodology. Besides, the research also found that visual information shown later in the source text is moved forward to the previous page and presented earlier in the verbal translation.
As for possible causes of explicitation, the thesis provided an integrated explanation by discussing and commenting on possible explanations proposed by previous scholars, including the assumptions about children and explicitation as a translation universal, and by offering a possible explanation from a historical
perspective. Until the early 21st century, picture storybooks were still a new type of book in Taiwan’s publishing industry, so the notion that words and pictures collaborate to tell a story was new or even unfamiliar to the industry. Since most of the five picture storybooks series examined in the thesis were translated and first published from
the 1980s to the 2000s, it might be possible that translators then were unfamiliar with the unique characteristic of picture storybooks as well and were not fully aware of the complex verbal-visual interplay in the translating process, and thus focused rather on whether the translated words are articulate and fluent. The thesis suggests that it is better to keep the word-picture relationship in target text the same as in the source text because by doing so, the importance of visual text and the uniqueness of word-picture interplay in picture storybooks might become more obvious for readers who can only access Chinese translation of picture storybooks.
1.3. Thesis Structure
This thesis contains five chapters: Introduction, Literature Review, Methodology, Results & Discussion, and Conclusion. The following chapter is dedicated to presenting and analyzing the existing literature directly related to the present research, and the methodology chapter elaborates on the analytical method utilized in this research, with a focus on textual and comparative techniques. The fourth chapter, Results & Discussion, presents the research findings together with analysis after the word-picture relationships in the original English texts and in the Chinese translated texts were compared. In the final chapter, the results in the previous section are summarized and concluded based on the research questions described in Section 1.2, and the limitations encountered in this research and suggestions for future research are reviewed and discussed.