ABSTRACT
Literature for young adults traditionally reflects the preoccupations and challenges experienced by young adults. In translation, these texts serve a particular pedagogical function for the new readers given the educational value of young adult (YA) fiction as a mirror of social and political change. This chapter presents a case study which forms part of a wider project examining the migration of post-apartheid South African YA fiction into other linguistic and socio-political spaces. I examine two South African YA texts and their translations into French and German respectively, focusing on the role and function of the paratexts. I use a theoretical framework based on critical discourse analysis, which highlights the link between ideology and power as revealed in language. The study reveals both similarities and differences between the two translations and the approaches adopted by the agents involved, related to the needs of the target audience. Both display a tendency to group South African YA texts as a homogenous body of literature, identifying them as strongly ‘South African’ in origin and content, and as being socially, politically and geographically removed from the target readers.
