A Comparative Study of Cultural Manipulation Strategies in Children’s Literature: A Case Study of Three Persian Translations of “Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls”

 The purpose of present study was exploring the strategies with Persian translators of children’s literature have adopted in dealing with culture specific items. Moreover, this study investigated the cultural factors which have led to applying specific strategies in transferring cultural items from one language culture to another. The parts being analyzed were extracted from a book entitled to Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls which is written in 2016 by Elena Favilli and Francesca Cavallo and its three translated books by three contemporary translators. The comparative descriptive study was done based on characteristics of children’s literature translation and cultural context adaptation components which are proposed by Klingberg (1986).  The main attention was paid on the problems which happen in the process of translating of culture items categorized by Klingberg: lexical items within the sentences of the target text that sounded different in the text with source text. The result showed that by regarding to Klingberg’s strategies, translators can use these strategies to purify the text some of which are not accepted in terms of cross cultural communication in the target reader culture (i.e. Persian children); and most cross cultural exchanges were translated in two stories out of the three.  Based on obtained results (frequencies and percentages) the researcher concluded that rewording, substitution, and deletion were known to be the most frequently used strategies by translators. At last, it was concluded that three translators of the mentioned book should attend to cross cultural communication activity and they must acquaint themselves with two cultures and two languages to achieve their meanings in their own cultural background and because of international subjects they should provide the child with opportunity to get new things about new cultures.