Chapter 4 - Sturm, Drang and Slang

Summary

This chapter tackles the translation of contemporary teenage literature through its focus on language as a problem – ambiguous, riddled with misunderstandings, clumsy, or subject to rapidly changing norms. Translating teenage literature implies navigating spaces between language as a place of both acculturation and experimentation. The first part explores elements within teenage fiction that invite the translator to treat language as resistant, alien, difficult. The next show that those literary nudges are counterbalanced by editorial drives towards naturalness and domestication. This leads to the necessity for the translator to commit not just politically but didactically to the text. The last part looks at what creative translation workshops with teenagers themselves might bring the translator in this endeavour, offering a meeting-point for aesthetic and didactic considerations in the translation of adolescent fiction.