The cultural context in the translation of young people’s literature: the adaptation of Naguib Mahfuz’s Tales for telling

Abstract

In this paper, I uphold the importance of the cultural context in the translation of Children’s Literature. From a comparative-contrastive point of view, I study the children’s adaptation –Cuentos para contar– translated to Spanish from the Arabic adult’s original work حكا اٌت حارتنا (Hikayat haratina), written by the Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz, but carried out through the mediation of a previous translation to Spanish also carried out for adults – Historias de nuestro barrio–. For the classification and analysis of cultural markers, I chose to follow Gisela Marcelo Wirnitzer’s Methodology (2007), though adapting it according to the analyzed work’s characteristics. This study puts special emphasis on the cultural context of the Arabic original work and how it was transferred to the Spanish adaptation. My ultimate aim here is to highlight the ambiguity which has occurred sometimes in the adapted work, bound for Spanish young-adult readers, through a not-so-adequate treatment of the cultural markers.