ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the primary interest in Australian specificity to discuss the 'literariness' of French translations in the corpus. The tendency for translators of children's books to take a descriptive approach de-emphasizes the normative constraints and explains why the literary in the present corpus often resists translation. The chapter is intended to highlight the range of 'readerly' approaches and strategies adopted by French translators for this corpus, when addressing issues of 'error', explicitation, normalization and purification in translated children's fiction. While 'mistakes' in translation represent an undesirable yet inevitable side effect of the translation process, they offer choice moments of insight into constraints of culture and language. Translations, while always showing moments of hesitation, contradiction or compromise, generally show a certain measure of consistency in the way they deal with the manifold differences between readers, language and culture in the source and target systems, and adhere to a certain model or prototype of translation.
