Author ｜
Lai Tzu-yun
Abstract ｜
During the 1960s, Taipei-based Dongfang publisher (東方出版社) published four series of children’s literature in Chinese, including “Biographies of the great people around the world”, “World literature for the young”, “The complete Arsène Lupin” and “The complete Sherlock Holmes”. The four series have been very popular in Taiwan for the past decades and are still in print today. Since the publisher only credited the original authors and Chinese adaptors, most readers and researchers assumed that those titles were adapted from the original languages, such as English or French. However, those four series were actually relay-translated from Japanese adaptions rather than the original languages. “Biographies of the great people around the world” were actually translated from a collection by Japanese publisher Kaiseisha (偕成社); “World literature for the young” were translated from two Japanese collections, published by Kaiseisha and Kodansha (講談社) respectively. Both “the complete Arsène Lupin” and “The complete Sherlock Holmes” were translated from Japanese adaptions of Poplar Publisher (ポプラ社). Most of those Japanese adaptions were published in the 1950s. Quite a few famous writers participated in the translation and adaptation, such as Minami Yoichiro (南洋一郎), Yamanaka Minetaro (山中峯太郎), Shibata Renzaburo (柴田錬三郎), Nasu Tatzuzo (那須辰造), MoriMichiyo (森三千代) and Saijo Yaso (西条八十) among others. Those adaptions reflected the idea of education in post-war Japan, emphasizing the world knowledge and moral building for the children. Among the Taiwanese translators, Huang Te-shi (黃得時), Lin Wen-yueh (林文月), Wen Hsin (文心) and Shih Tsui-feng (施翠峰) were well-known native Taiwanese writers, who had been educated in Japanese during the colonial period (1896-1945). Under the political climate of “de-Japanization” in post-war Taiwan, those Taiwanese translators did not mention their Japanese counterparts. Few existing researches of children’s literature in Taiwan acknowledge the existence of the Japanese adaptions between the original works and their Chinese renditions. This present paper aims to locate the Japanese origins of those translated literature in Taiwan, and describe the adaption strategy of Japanese writers as well as the translation strategy of the Taiwanese translators.
keywords ｜
Dongfang publisher, biography of the great people, world literature for the young, Japanese adaptions