“’History is horrible but it is MORE Horrible in Some Places than Others’: the Translation of History Books for Children”

Information books on history are one of the essential vehicles for popularizing historical knowledge among juvenile audience. They are a form of « edutainment », a « hybrid genre » merging education with entertainment. The oxymoron combination of these two seemigly contradictory dimensions makes notions and concepts more comprehensible and involves young readers. If the importance of these texts in knowledge dissemination is indisputable, their translation is still an unexplored research area. This situation is determined by two factors: on the one hand, the translation of popularisation for adults is also univestigated (Liao 2010, 2013) and on the other, the studies on the translation for children are relatively recent (see Lathey 2006). The present study therefore compares two parallel corpora composed of two British series of history books for children and their respective Italian target texts, DK Eyewitness and Horrible Histories. The starting point is Reiss’ "Zur Übersetzung von Kinder – und Jügendbchern. Theorie und Praxis" (1982) in which she stresses that the content should be accurately tranferred in the translations of informative texts for children. Actually, the preciseness of the information given appears to be one of the translators’ main concerns rather than the precise rendition of the source content. Evidently, this tendency subsumes a different idea of knowledge popularisation, of education, and of the child reader between the source texts and the target texts.