Translating the visual ecology: Paratranslation and environmental awareness in children's books
Translating the visual ecology: Paratranslation and environmental awareness in children's books

Summary/Abstract: Illustrations in children's books offer a multi-sensory learning experience that enhances children's understanding of complex ecological concepts such as climate change, pollution, and biodiversity. By employing visual metaphors, perspectives, and expressive imagery, illustrations turn environmental challenges into tangible and relatable representations. Apart from complementing textual narratives, they can serve as a catalyst for enhancing environmental awareness among children in various ways, such as instilling environmental behaviors or encouraging children to engage in environmental actions. Based on these facts, this study aims to analyze the role of translating illustrations on the environmental awareness of children in relation to Turkish translations of environmental picture books. Applying visual content analysis and multimodal content analysis of the illustrations in the translations, it explores how these translated paratexts represent the agentic relations between humans/non-humans and the environment in order to understand whether they can reveal how the target culture understands, or is supposed to understand, the culturally specific image of the child-environment relations. For the visual content analysis of the illustrations, the concepts of paratranslation and multimodal translation are informed by a post-human and new materialist perspective. The findings demonstrate that translating illustrations in environmental children's books can have a significant impact on children's environmental awareness and engagement, bridging global environmental issues and local concerns.

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