ABSTRACT
In his analysis of nineteenth-century translations of Grimms’ tales, Martin Sutton observes that ‘all the translators named on the title pages of editions published from 1855 were women’ (1996: 3): it seems that as Grimms’ tales became more popular and were read by more children, female translators came to the fore. But it is also the perception of connections between women, children, and translation that is pertinent to this history. Duncan Mennie’s assumption concerning the anonymous translation of Struwwelpeter, in a comment made in 1948, that ‘the translator’s skill in manipulating nursery words of the time like ‘sloven’ and ‘nasty physic’ makes one suspect the hand of a woman, possibly one of the poor English governesses who ate the bread of exile in so many countries of Europe in the nineteenth century’ (cited in O’Sullivan, 2000b: 61), expresses the gender-determined logic of its time that that the translator of a children’s book was most likely to be a woman capable of translating ‘nursery words’.
