'My mother thinks I eat like this’ – ‘Mia madre pensa che io mangi come un maialino’: the Translation of Picture Books and of their many Languages

Children under a certain age (7-10) are not able to understand figurative language and interpret it literally. However, children’s literature fully exploits its expressive potential, even in genres addressed to very young readers since the presence of a “difficult” language may actually stimulate the child’s imagination (Rodari 1997: 7). An interesting case is that of picture books, in which words and images both contribute to creating the narration given that, in these literary products for small children, figurative language combines in many ways: on the one hand, the illustrations might help in understanding the transferred meaning while, on the other, they generate a complex game of echoes between literal and figurative meanings (Terrusi 2012: 101). If, according to Epstein (2013: 23), the translator should try to face figurative expressions, the challenge in picture books is sometimes almost insurmountable because of the multimodal nature of these texts. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine how the figurative language is realized and how translators handle it. In particular, a selection of fifteen picture books by British and American classical authors has been analyzed; some of them turned out to be particularly useful for a preliminary classification.