“History is Horrible. Especially in Schools:” Remediating History Books for Children in Translation

The paper focuses on information books on history and their translation, thereby examining the changes occurred in the translating process. If popularizing is an act of “mediation between expert and lay audience”, this “hybrid genre”, at the crossroad between informative and entertaining discourses, can be said to create a multifaceted and multimodal type of mediation that needs to meet children’s supposed cognitive abilities and background knowledge. In particular, the analysis shows that historical information books undergo a further process of “re-mediation”, underlying a different idea of popularisation and a different idea of readership. In point of fact, the shifts between the source texts and the target texts reveal an unexpected for of “complexification” through which the translations turn out to be more accurate than their respective originals. Therefore, the translations imply the idea that this “informal learning”, even if it is optional, needs to be detailed and exhaustive.