The Comparative Cat and How to Translate it – A Comparative Children’s Literature and Literary Animal Studies Approach

Abstract

Literary animals appear very often in traditional fairy tales and modern literary texts and animal character's proper names have – almost every time – a deliberate meaning. Τheir translation usually interacts with common words and, in the case of Children's Literature probably with images in illustrated books or animated films. Literary cats in The Story of a Seagull and the Cat Who Taught Her to Fly by Luis Sepulveda in the original Spanish edition La Historia de una gaviota y del gato que le enseñó a volar(1996) and its translation in Modern Greek edition Η ιστορία ενός γάτου που έμαθε σ’ένα γλάρο να πετάει (2008), translated by Achilleas Kyriakidis, are literary animals created by words in two different languages and could be analyzed from a Comparative Children’s Literature perspective. The article will provide an interdisciplinary Literary Animal Studies and Comparative Children’s Literature theoretical and methodological approach to how interlingual literary cat character proper names translation from Spanish to Modern Greek could establish a young reader's inter-semiotic conception of the character of a literary cat.

Keywords

• animal literary studies
• comparative children’s literature
• translation
• literary cat
• zoonym