Abstracts
Abstract
This paper presents cognitive poetics as an agent in overcoming difficulties in translating bible stories for young children in the multi-lingual and multi-cultural South African environment. The translated picture book texts typically involve the integration of words with pictures. For the purposes of this article, the Genesis 28 narrative of Jacob’s dream in the Hebrew source text is compared in various South African translations. Religious literature was chosen as subject matter because of the relative certainty of comparative translations in most of the eleven official languages of South Africa, but the present article is limited mainly to English and Afrikaans translations. The analysis is done within the fairly new framework of cognitive poetics, which combines psychological and cognitive linguistic approaches to the study of literature. The focus is on the contribution of cognitive linguistics to the translation of children’s literature, in the spirit of proactive translatology.
Keywords/Mots-Clés:
- cognitive poetics,
- cognitive linguistics,
- South Africa,
- Bible,
- children’s literature
Résumé
Cet essai traite de la poésie cognitive comme facilitateur dans les traductions des histoires bibliques pour enfants dans l’environnement multiculturel et polyglotte de l’Afrique du Sud. Les traductions des textes des livres illustrés font généralement correspondre les mots avec des images. Dans l’exemple utilisé, soit la Genèse 28, le rêve de Jacob, dans son texte original en hébreu, est comparé à diverses traductions sud-africaines. La littérature religieuse a été choisie comme sujet de cet essai, étant donné la présence probable de traductions comparables dans la plupart des onze langues officielles de l’Afrique du Sud, mais cet article se limite à la comparaison des traductions anglaise et afrikaans seulement. L’analyse est faite dans le cadre relativement récent de la poésie cognitive, qui applique des approches linguistiques psychologique et cognitive à l’étude de la littérature. La concentration se fait sur la contribution de la linguistique cognitive dans la traduction de la littérature pour enfants dans un esprit de traduction proactive.
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Appendices
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