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Förklaringsmodeller : om att göra komplicerade ord och begrepp begripliga för barn och ungdomar

Author

  • Ulla Maria Källqvist

Summary, in English

In this essay I have done an analysis of a text by Nick Arnold who is a writer of children’s books about science with the ambition to make science accessible to everyone, and especially to children. I have translated the first 6 000 words of his Measly Medicine(2006), looked into different methods of explanation he uses in order to make difficult subjects available to children, and analysed what I have done while transferring his explanations into Swedish. My main translating strategy has been to preserve as much as possible of the source text, and there are explanation models where this translating strategy works well – they are not too difficult to transfer into Swedish. But I have also found other types of explanation methods where I had to use a different strategy in order to maintain the alliteration or the humour in the original text. In some cases I found that the humour in the original was impossible to transfer into Swedish and to my regret I had to skip the humour and translate the content, the message only.
In conclusion I must say that translating British humour is not an easy task and my attempts have succeeded to various degrees. Some solutions worked better than others but I hope that on the whole they represent Arnold’s text fairly well. A kind eleven-year-old who read my translation told me that the text was similar to that in some of the books in the series that he had on his bookshelf.

Department/s

  • Translation Program

Publishing year

2011

Language

Swedish

Document type

Student publication for Master's degree (one year)

Topic

  • Languages and Literatures

Keywords

  • faktaböcker för barn
  • engelsk humor
  • förklaringsmodeller
  • översättningsstrategier

Supervisor

  • Lennart Nyberg
  • Per Lagerholm