"Snow White" Gets Black Hair and Brown Eyes – on Censorship in the Translation of English Children’s Literature into Arabic
"Snow White" Gets Black Hair and Brown Eyes – on Censorship in the Translation of English Children’s Literature into Arabic

Summary/Abstract: Children’s literature is subject to different kinds of censorship which aims at adapting foreign texts in some way to fit certain ideology. Censorship in the Arab world involves the process of domestication of culturally-marked expressions, as, in the opinion of Arab scholars, young readers are threatened by a cultural invasion from the West that prevents the spread of local children’s literature. In this case, censorship is a means to preserve Arab cultural identity and moralizing role assigned to children’s literature. This article is aimed at presenting the major features of Arabic children’s literature as well as constraints which the censorship imposes on translators and the consequences of such restrictions. Moreover, some examples of censorship in the translation of English children’s literature into Arabic are provided on the basis of the research conducted by Arab scholars. They compared original English versions with their Arabic adaptations. The results show that the censorship is still a powerful means of influencing children’s books.

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