ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of translation across the mercurial history of the fairy tale through additional egregious instances of the difference a translator can make to the audience for a set of texts and their reception. It discusses retranslation indicates differing reasons for revisiting a source text. The chapter explores the phenomenon of relay translation across more than one language, embodied in the trajectory of the Arabian Nights tales from Arabic into French and then into other languages. Antoine Galland, Robert Samber, Edgar Taylor, Wanda Gag and all the translators stand as representatives of the many forgotten hands across the globe whose linguistic and literary talents have shaped the multifaceted development of the fairy tale. French fairy tales began to appear in English in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries at a time when translation was not a profession, but rather a means of earning income by anyone who happened to read languages other than English.
