A Bear Called Paddington: uno studio diacronico delle traduzioni del romanzo di Michael Bond.

The focus of this work is on children’s literature in translation. Children’s literature began to be a culturally admitted genre only from the beginning of 18th century. The whole industry of children’s books began to gain importance only in the second half of the 19th century. There are several reasons for this delay in the production of books specifically written for children. The main factor that gave rise to the development of children’s literature was a change at the beginning of the 17th century in the way childhood was understood by adults; children were now considered to be individual people distinct from adults, with their own needs and interests. Critical interest in the translation of children’s literature has developed only over the last 30 years. The first signs of an interest in the issues of cross-cultural influences and the international diffusion of children’s literature arose from the discipline of Comparative Literature. With the introduction of “Translation Studies” in the 20th century, a new approach to the translation activity came out, no longer prescriptive but also descriptive, joining together theory and practice. Unlike adult’s literature, norms governing children’s literature are imposed by several cultural systems such as the educational, ethical and religious ones. In accordance with these theories, in this paper we will analyze two different translations of the book A Bear called Paddington by Michael Bond written in 1958, the first book about the adventures of the bear that became a classic of children’s literature in the United Kingdom. In the diachronic study of the Italian versions, L’Orso del Perù and L’Orso Paddington that came out respectively in 1962 and 2014, we will take into account the social, cultural and ideological constraints involved with a translation from a source text to a target text, analyzing the particular case of children’s literature