The twists and turns of a timeless puppet: Violence and the translation and adaptation of Carlo Collodi's "Le avventure di Pinocchio"

Abstract

This thesis explores two English translations of Carlo Collodi's Le avventure di Pinocchio (1883), one by British translator M. A. Murray in 1891 and the other by American translator Walter S. Cramp in 1904. It also examines Walt Disney's adaptation of Pinocchio (1940) for the screen, and in the process studies how the different English target cultures and systems have motivated and influenced translators' and adaptors' decisions and how, therefore, translations and adaptations are necessarily products of their environment. My approach is to focus specifically on moments of violence in Collodi's text, and use them as particularly 'hot' text situations from which to study the English translations. These translations are placed into and then analysed in regard to their respective reconstructed socio-cultural, literary and translation contexts. The norms governing the British and American translators' and American adaptor's respective versions provide some insight into the translators' and adaptor's approach to violence in children's literature and help identify possible reasons for the differences between the source and the target texts, and also between the different translations. Skopostheorie, Descriptive Translation Studies, polysystem theory and norm theory all play a role in the analyses.