Ideology and interpretation in children's illustrated books

Jostein Gaarder's de Gule Dvergene (The yellow dwarves) and its spanish version

Abstract

This article deals with the relationship between written text and images in children’s illustrated books. The purpose is to examine the role that illustrations can play in children’s books, and how the interplay between the written text and the images opens up new interpretations in the translation of the book when the illustrations are changed. The article compares the source text of a children’s book with illustrations from several translated versions, focusing on the Spanish version. The changing of the images in the Spanish translation may give the text an ideological undertone that is present in the original, but is not intended by the author or by the illustrator of the translated text. The volume analysed here is the illustrated children’s book De gule dvergene (The Yellow Dwarves, 2006), written by the Norwegian author Jostein Gaarder, and its translation into Spanish by Kirsti Baggethun and Asunción Lorenzo (Los enanos amarillos, 2007). The Norwegian original is illustrated by Jill Moursund, and the Spanish version by Mónica Gutiérrez Serna.