When Panache l’écureuil became Pompom the Little Red Squirrel and Mischief the Squirrel: the Anglophone translations of Père Castor’s Roman des Bêtes and the cultural significance of adding a “little” word

Abstract

By combining textual analysis with archival evidence from Les Archives du Père Castor (Meuzac, France) and the George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Archive (University of Reading, UK), this paper sets out to examine and assess the respective merits of two parallel sets of translations, each subtly adapted for separate Anglophone markets. Methods drawn from corpus linguistics were employed to compare linguistic patterns and examine key words across sixteen translated picture books, with particular attention given to the word “little”, a distinctive feature in Anglophone children’s literature. Whilst all translations could be said to bear the marks of the shadowy fingerprints of their translators, the examination of two sets of concurrent translations also provides a snapshot of a precise moment in translation history, allowing us to move beyond the act of translation and seek out wider received notions of cultural norms present in children’s picture books of the 1930s.

Keywords

• translation
• English-speaking
• archives
• Faucher (Paul)
• picturebook
• Père Castor