Translating Mark Twain's The Adventure of Tom Sawyer with Commentary

Abstract

Children literature is an important field of translation and translators of this field are considered as gatekeepers. This study is an attempt offer a translation to the simplified version of Mark Twain's The Adventure of Tom Sawyer from English into Arabic. It also briefly gives notes about the author, states the plot, the themes and characters. It attempts to highlight the challenges the researchers have faced while translating this simplified novel. These challenges are related to structure, style, culture, etc. The main themes of this novel, story we could say for this simplified version, are crime, friendship, maturity and growth, good and evil and looking for freedom. The researchers provided an Arabic translation for the simplified novel. Giving a commentary, they have discussed the different strategies thy have used to render this story into Arabic. They have utilized paraphrasing, transposition, transliteration, culture substitution, repetition, insertion and deletion to overcome the challenges. It is recommended to benefit from these strategies while rendering children literature.