Cultural Context Adaptation Strategies in the Translations of Pinocchio: From Italian to Croatian

The paper looks into Croatian translations of Pinocchio, from its first translation, its later editions, to its retranslations in the 1990s and later. The term "retranslation" is used to refer to a new translation into the same target language of a previously translated work (Koskinen and Paloposki 2010). Pinocchio was first translated into Croatian in 1943 by writer and translator Vjekoslav Kaleb. This translation appeared in numerous editions after 1945 and is still being read by schoolchildren in Croatia. It co-exists with a number of retranslations, which appeared since 1996, in a completely different socio-political and cultural setting. The process of retranslation is interpreted with respect to the retranslation hypothesis. Translation as adaptation (Klingberg 1986) is also used as a theoretical basis for cultural content analysis. The aim of the research is twofold: (1) to establish possible differences between the first translation, its later editions (published after 1945) and the retranslations (published in the 1990s and later), which occurred due to the different sociopolitical context in which they appeared (see Pokorn 2012); (2) to identify culture-specific items, such as personal names, foodstuffs, regional expressions, etc., and to compare the solutions of the translators in different translations; the identified culture-specific units are analysed according to the level of domestication and foreignisation in the translations, and the reasons for retranslations are considered.