’A doll’, said his brother. ‘Don’t be a creep!’ Challenging Gender Stereotypes and Promoting Gender Diversity in the Translation of William’s Doll

Since the 1970s, picturebooks for pre-schoolers have been at the heart of the studies centred on gender stereotyping and gender identity in children’s literature (Ernst 1995; Stephens 1996; Sunderland 2011; Epstein 2013; Epstein 2014). This is hardly surprising given their pivotal role in children’ sex role development and socialization (Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, Ross 1972; Flanagan 2010). Indeed, most of these literary products have been tools for explicitly and implicitly perpetrating stereotyped gender models and beliefs by presenting fixed sex-typed behaviours and a prevalence of male protagonists over female ones (see Weitzman, Eifler, Hokada, and Ross 1972; Kolbe and LaVoie 1981; Segel 1982; Anderson and Hamilton 2005). However, despite the persistence of this imbalance between male and female characters and gendered biases, the last three decades have seen the proliferation of non-sexist, anti-sexist, (Zipes 1987; Kropp and Halverson, 1983; Davis 1984; Dellmann-Jenkins, Florjancic, and Swadener 1993, Sunderland 2011), and LGBT children’s books thanks to different social movements (Sunderland 2011; Epstein 2013). The aim of this paper is to analyse a specific picturebook, William’s Doll by Charlotte Zolotow, published in 1972, and its Italian translation, which saw the light almost 40 years later. This picturebook is considered a revolutionary text, showing one of the first “gender-transgressive characters” (Herzog 2009: 64) portrayed in this genre. Actually, the Italian version challenges gender roles more than the American source text in a complex interplay between the visual and the verbal levels. It is thereby emblematic of how translations can enhance gender diversity and inclusion and how the image of the child and of the adult reading aloud may diverge in the source text and in the target text.