ABSTRACT
Throughout this history prefaces, notes, and afterwords have been the major sources of explicit commentaries by translators on their working practices, alongside intratextual evidence of the translator’s presence. O’Sullivan (2005) has analysed this discursive presence of the translator in children’s literature and constructs a model of narrative communication that includes the ‘implied translator’1 who adjusts the values and contextual information in the source text for the child reader of the target language. Beyond these traces within the translated text itself, however, the translator of texts for children has traditionally remained silent on the specifi c challenges of translating for the young. In the last forty years, thanks to an increased academic interest in translation for young readers within translation and children’s literature studies, translators of children’s literature have begun to establish a separate voice, so that it is now possible to gain a much clearer idea of the strategies and publishing transactions of these professionals from interviews, commentaries, and articles on translation published in a variety of venues. At the same time there has been an increase in the number of instances where translators directly address child readers, rather than their parents or teachers, in prefatory remarks.
