AustLit

Post 1945, Australian writers have produced a significant body of work from which an equally impressive number of translations have now been published. In the period 1945-2007, around eighty different authors have contributed to over 270 German-language translations of Australian children's fiction. Many authors have written and published consistently over two or more decades and, in such cases, the author's entire (or close to) body of work has been translated into German. Drawing from a corpus of Australian children's novels translated into German in the period from 1945 to the present, this paper investigates the way in which titles are translated. It addresses how choices made by paratextual mediators affect the way the translation is marketed in the target culture: specifically, whether any specifically Australian cultural signifiers are employed in the titles. In a broader sense, the paper also analyses how the different cultural norms of the target culture may impact upon the translation of titles, thus assisting in the growing understanding of the role of paratextual mediation in translation. [Source: Monash University Linguistics Papers vol. 6, no. 1]