Children's Picture Books and Emotions: A Translation Approach through Emozionario. Dimmi cosa senti

Abstract

The aim of this article is to offer an integrated translation approach for non-fiction picturebooks by considering different aspects, such as their multimodal character, their target audience and the variety of functions characterizing them, i.e. referential, expressive and humorous. For children, reading complex texts such as picturebooks means enriching their cognitive, esthetic and emotional skills, but also acquiring encyclopedic knowledge and learning lexical items. Within the recent production of children non-fiction picturebooks we can find those explaining emotions, the words defining them and their semantic correlations. This article focuses on Italian children's editions of picturebooks based on emotions, especially on books translated from Spanish. We will analyze the translation approach of Emozionario. Dimmi cosa senti (Italian translation of the Spanish Emocionario. Di lo que sientes by Cristina Núñez Pereira and Rafael R. Valcárcel, 2015, Nord-Sud Edizioni). While being aware of the limitations of medium-constrained translation, we suggest the application of a set of complex translation actions to this type of assignment, i.e. proper documentation, a thorough understanding of the aims of the translated text, awareness of the linguistic and encyclopedic knowledge of the target audience, and the ability of rewriting the target text, in line with where it will be published, as well as with peritextual elements and the iconotext.