Uncovering the Translator’s Techniques in Retaining the Beauty of Poetic Children's Stories

Studies on translation of children’s literature have been widely explored by researchers with a number of focus on translation readability, proper names, titles, and culture-specific terms. One area that is still rare to study is the presence of bilingual children’s books that are presented poetically, where the author writes the stories using poetic devices (such as presenting them in stanzas and rhyming expressions) and where the translator produces the translated stories with the same poetic sense. This study focuses our special attention to the issue of the translation of poetic illustrated stories for children, which aims to describe ways the translator of book series “Archipelago Legend” renders the poetic markers in his translation, particularly to keep maintaining the message of the Source Text (ST) in the Target Text (TT) and the beauty of the stanzas. Under the design of descriptive qualitative research, we analyzed seven bilingual books of Indonesia’s “Archipelago Legend”. Stanzas in the stories and their translations were selected and categorized into types of poetic devices used by the writer and the translator. The source language construction and their translations, as well as the poetic devices in both ST and TT were analyzed with the aim at exploring the translator’s techniques in maintaining the beauty of the poetic stories in rendering the message of ST. Lastly, techniques used by the translator were observed and conclusion was drawn. The analysis of data reveals the fact that the translator of book series “Archipelago Legend” retains the beauty of the stories. He keeps the stanzas and the majority of the rhyming expressions in the end of each line. Tendencies to use inverted sentences, double subjects in a line, ellipsis, and addition to maintain both the beauty of dictions and rhymes are obvious. Incorporating literary dictions and figurative expressions to present words with poetic sense and to deepen the meaning attached to each word is yet another technique used by the translator. Keyword: children’s literature, translating poetic stories, Indonesia’s archipelago legend.