A Bibliometric Analysis of Translation Studies of Children’s Literature and Its Implications

Children’s literature is the body of written works and accompanying illustrations created or later adapted for children readers to entertain or instruct them.^[1,2] It enjoys a profound history of translation, through which children of one nation have access to children’s literature of other cultures. Since the late 1970s, academic interest in children’s literature translation has grown rapidly. And the approach has evolved from holistic research based on personal experience^[3] to prescriptive research centered on source texts,^[4] and then to descriptive research centered on target texts. From multidisciplinary perspectives, descriptive research has focused on subtle and intricate phenomena in children’s literature translation, such as the influence of ideology and censorship on translation^[5] and the relationship between words and illustrations.^[6] The findings of current studies have facilitated the understanding of children’s literature translation and offered enlightenment to the practice of translating children’s literature.

Due to the proliferation of publications on children’s literature translation, there have emerged several articles and books that have reviewed the developments in this field. Tabbert^[7] surveyed the change of paradigm in translation studies of children’s literature since the 1960s, and found the methodological shift from source-orientedness to target-orientedness. Lathey^[8] presented a collection of seminal articles on various topics relevant to children’s literature translation from 1978 to 2003. Li^[9] offered a systematic review of what has been done in the field of children’s literature translation in China and beyond from the 1980s to the 2010s, and suggested the areas to which future studies should pay attention. García de Toro^[10] summarized the key issues and hot topics in children’s literature translation from the 1990s to the 2020s, and pointed out future research directions. These reviews have outlined substantive domains, theoretical approaches, current debates, and major advances and discoveries in this field worldwide. Thus, they can provide a clear understanding of the latest developments in the field for those who wish to enter the research field. On the other hand, these reviews have pointed out significant gaps in the field and suggested where research might go next. As such, they can assist those already engaged in translation studies of children’s literature in identifying and addressing potential research questions that might provide further insight into the practice of translating children’s literature.

Unfortunately, these reviews have focused on a limited number of publications and thus ignored many important publications in the field. Therefore, taking a bibliometric approach, the present article aims to provide a quantitative analysis of relevant publications. The findings of this article can unpack the evolutionary nuances, the current situation, and the development trend of translation studies of children’s literature in the global range. The rest of the article is organized as follows. Section two describes the data source and methods of data analysis. Section three reports the findings from the four aspects: (1) annual trends of publications, (2) productive contributors at the country/region, institution, author, and journal levels, (3) influential publications, and (4) popular topics, language pairs, and research types and methods. Section four discusses the major findings and implications.

The data were collected from the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection on December 11, 2022. Several points should be noted about the data collection. First, the bibliographic data were restricted to articles, excluding reviews, books, book chapters, and conference proceedings. On the one hand, articles are of significance in bibliometric analysis for their original research findings; on the other hand, articles always include keyword, which facilitates the analysis of popular topics in the field under investigation.

Second, WoS was chosen as the data source because it is one of the most influential and comprehensive databases of bibliographic information on a global scale. More specifically, the bibliographic data were from three sub-databases of WoS: Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), Arts and Humanities Citation Index (A and HCI), and Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI). These three sub-databases were chosen because translation studies of children’s literature belong to the discipline of literature and language, and relevant articles usually appear in journals indexed by these three sub-databases.

Third, articles containing the terms “children’s literature translation” and its synonyms such as “children’s book translation” and “picture book translation” were downloaded from the three sub-databases. They were then manually checked to exclude repeated or unrelated articles to ensure the articles’ relevance for the purpose of this bibliometric analysis. In the end, the aforementioned query obtained a total of 237 articles.

For the data analysis, we employed a series of bibliometric methods and analysis tools. First, we put 237 articles with their full bibliographic information into Microsoft Excel 2021.¹ This bibliographic data can be accessed at Bibliographic Information.

The information includes the following categories: author, country/region, institution, article title, journal, publication year, keywords, abstract, language pairs (if applicable), and citation times. Then, we used the information to calculate a set of bibliometric indicators that measure research productivity, impact, and hotspot. For research productivity, we used publication counts, i.e., the number of articles in a given year, author, country/region, institution, and journal. For research impact, we used citation counts, i.e., the times an article is cited. For research hotspot, we investigated the popularity of topics and language pairs by counting the frequency of keywords, and the source and target languages involved in children’s literature translation. Besides, we used VOSviewer version 1.6.18, a software tool for constructing and visualizing bibliometric networks,^[11] to generate a visual keyword co-occurrence map that groups the most popular topics into clusters and shows research developments over time.

This section presents the findings of the bibliometric analysis of the collected 237 articles.

Figure 1 shows the annual trends in the number of articles on translation studies of children’s literature. It can be seen that the number of articles exceeded ten in 2017 and remained at a high level thereafter, which indicates that children’s literature translation has attracted more and more scholarly attention in recent years. Such a phenomenon may be due to the increasing number of children’s literature imported into various countries. It should be noted that 22 articles were published in 2003. This abundance of articles can be explained by the fact that the journal, Meta: Translators’ Journal, dedicated a double volume to translating children’s literature and translating for children. This double volume dealt with a variety of topics, ranging from reading aloud and the visual in comics and picture book translation to the role of the publishers and the different child images translators have.^[12]

Figure 1:
Annual Trends of Publications on Translation Studies of Children’s Literature.

This subsection presents the most productive contributors at the country/region, institution, author, and journal levels.

In total, the articles under investigation originated from 43 countries/regions. Table 1 shows the 13 most productive countries/regions. Spain was the most productive country/region with 29 articles, followed by China and England with 20 and 19 articles, respectively. Other productive countries/regions include South Africa (18), USA (14), Poland (14), Finland (9), Brazil (9), Belgium (8), Russia (8), Japan (7), Canada (7), and South Korea (7). Many of these countries/regions are the places where translation studies has always been flourishing, such as Spain, England, Poland, and Belgium. It is worth mentioning that since Hong Kong and Macao are special administrative regions of China, their data are included in China’s in the WoS system. In fact, 7 of the 20 articles by contributors from China were produced by Hong Kong-based and Macao-based scholars. In spite of this, scholars from mainland China still contributed 13 articles, which accounts for 5.485% of all articles. This manifests that like some non-European countries, China has become an emerging powerhouse of translation studies in recent years. In terms of the number of total citations, South Africa tops the list, followed by England, Belgium, and Finland. This suggests a lack of correspondence between the rankings based on the number of articles and the total citation count.

In sum, the articles under investigation originated from 178 institutions. Table 2 shows the 20 most productive institutions. North-West University made the most contributions to this field with seven articles. It was followed by the University of Wrocław, the University of the Basque Country, and Walter Sisulu University, all of which contributed at least five articles. As for the countries/regions to which the most productive institutions belong, four institutions are based in Spain, three in South Africa, two in Poland and in China, and all of them are the most productive countries/regions in Table 1. In terms of the number of total citations, the University of the Witwatersrand is in the first place, followed by Ghent University, Tampere University, and North-West University. This shows that although some institutions do not have the highest publication count, the impact of their publications is significant.

In total, 251 authors contributed individually or cooperatively to the corpus of 237 articles under investigation. Of the 251 authors, 224 (89.243%) contributed only one article, and 12 (4.781%) contributed three or more articles. In this article, they are regarded as the most productive authors, and their information is presented in Table 3. Among the 12 most productive authors, Haidee Kotze, contributing eight articles, topped the list, followed by Yolisa Madolo and Naroa Zubillaga Gomez with five and four articles, respectively. And the remaining nine most productive authors contributed three articles each.

In terms of the number of total citations, Judith Inggs stands out as the most influential scholar of all the authors. With three articles on children’s literature translation, Inggs has received 40 citations in total, with an average of 13.33 citations per article.

Her article “Censorship and Translated Children’s Literature in the Soviet Union: The Example of the Wizards Oz and Goodwin” alone has received 18 citations. Another highly influential author is Haidee Kotze, who has received a total of 34 citations for eight relevant articles. And no other productive author has received more than 30 citations.

An interesting phenomenon is that although the productive authors in Table 3 contributed 44 articles, only five articles were co-authored, accounting for 11.364% of the total 44 articles, which means a large proportion of single-authorship. This finding is largely consistent with the dominant status of single-authorship in the articles under investigation (of the 237 articles, 190 were single-authored, accounting for 80.169% of the total articles). The high percentage of single-authored articles suggests a lack of cooperation among scholars in translation studies of children’s literature.

A total of 83 journals published the 237 articles under investigation, indicating an average of 2.86 articles per journal. Among them, 15 journals published three or more articles on children’s literature translation, contributing 152 articles in sum. Of the rest, 17 published two articles and 51 published only one. Among the 15 most productive journals, Meta, Perspectives, MonTI, Children’s Literature in Education, Bookbird, and International Research in Children’s Literature took the lead, each contributing more than ten articles (see Table 4). Among these six journals, Meta led by a wide margin, publishing almost twice as many articles as the journal in the second place. This can be partially due to the double volume that Meta devoted to translating children’s literature and translating for children in 2003. Nonetheless, with the articles published in the double volume excluded, Meta still contributed 14 articles on children’s literature translation, suggesting that Meta is a desirable publication outlet for relevant research. It is also necessary to notice the publication years of articles. Meta, Perspectives, Children’s Literature in Education, and International Research in Children’s Literature continuously publish relevant articles, while MonTI remarkably publishes relevant articles in 2022. This indicates that MonTI is emerging as a forum for scholars and professionals who are exploring issues related to children’s literature translation.

In this article, the impact of an article is measured by its citation frequency according to the statistics of the WoS system. The higher the citation frequency of an article, the more influential it is. Table 5 shows the most influential articles with a citation frequency over ten. These influential articles were published in Meta, Target, Children’s Literature in Education, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, and Perspectives. Noticeably, seven of these influential articles were published in the double volume that Meta devoted to translating children’s literature and translating for children in 2003.

Christiane Nord’s article “Proper Names in Translations for Children: Alice in Wonderland as a Case in Point” topped the list with 39 citations. This article examines the translators’ strategies for dealing with proper names in children’s books and finds that the observed strategies produce different communicative effects for the respective audiences.^[13] It highlights the functions translation intends to serve, which is the application of functional theories of translation. The citing articles were published in leading journals in translation studies and children’s literature studies, such as Perspectives, Babel, Children’s Literature in Education, and History of Education and Children’s Literature. Another article that has received more than 30 citations is “Narratology Meets Translation Studies, or, The Voice of the Translator in Children’s Literature” by Emer O’Sullivan. This article constructs a communicative model of translation and applies it to the analysis of the translator’s presence in translated children’s literature.^[14] The model links the theoretical fields of narratology and translation studies, demonstrating the value of interdisciplinary studies. The citing articles were also published in influential journals in relevant fields, such as Target, Translation and Interpreting Studies, Neohelicon, and International Research in Children’s Literature.

A finding of interest is that many of the influential articles in Table 5 deal with issues pertinent to cultural and ideological considerations in children’s literature translation. For example, Ilaria Parini’s article “Censorship of Anime in Italian Distribution” focuses on the censorship that takes place in the process of editing Japanese anime for Italian children and stresses Italian translators’ active role in performing (self) censorship on the verbal level.^[15] Since the cultural and ideological turn of translation studies in the late 20^th century, numerous publications have approached translation phenomena from the cultural and ideological perspectives. It is not surprising that many of the influential articles under investigation touch upon cultural and ideological differences between the source and target texts. Another notable indication of this article is the growing scholarly interest in translating non-verbal elements in children’s literature.

In addition to Parini’s article, another most influential article “Where the Wild Things Are: Translating Picture Books” also discusses non-verbal elements in children’s literature translation, particularly the relationship between the verbal and the visual.^[16]

This subsection presents the most productive language pairs, topics, and research types and methods.

In a narrow sense, translation is an activity of rendering one language into another. Children’s literature translation involves two languages, namely the source and target languages, and sometimes multiple languages when children’s literature is introduced into different countries. Table 6 presents the most popular language pairs in translation studies of children’s literature. It shows that the most popular language pair is English-Chinese. Since the policy of reform and opening up was initiated, China has experienced a boom in children’s literature translation. A large number of foreign children’s books have been continuously translated and introduced to Chinese children, many of which are English children’s books, such as The Happy Prince, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and Winnie the Pooh. The massive Chinese translations of English children’s literature could explain the popularity of the English-Chinese language pair in translation studies of children’s literature. And any other popular language pair has been explored in no more than 20 articles.

Another noteworthy finding is that English is the most popular language in the language pairs in Table 6. According to the Table 6, the 15 most popular language pairs all involve English, and the number of articles involving English is 132, accounting for 86.275% of the articles under investigation. Two scenarios could explain this phenomenon. First, many English children’s books have been introduced into non-English speaking countries. For example, the article “Translation of Children’s Literature in Iran and the Dichotomy of Identities” investigates Persian translators’ choice between domestication and foreignization when translating English books for children.^[17] Second, many non-English children’s books have been introduced into English-speaking countries. For example, the article “True Love or Just Friends? Flemish Picture Books in English Translation” discusses the strategies of translating Flemish picture books into English for the very young when norm conflicts arise.^[18] To some extent, the popularity of English in the corpus of 237 articles proves that English is the most widely used language in the world.

In order to gain insight into the landscape of research topics in translation studies of children’s literature, we used VOSviewer version 1.6.18 to count the frequency of keywords and to create a visual keyword co-occurrence map. First, we imported the bibliographic data of the 237 articles.² This bibliographic data can be accessed at Bibliographic Information – OneDrive (live.com).

under investigation into VOSviewer version 1.6.18. Then, we selected the analysis type of co-occurrence, the analysis unit of author keywords, and the full counting method. Next, we set the minimum number of occurrences of a keyword to two, and of the 731 keywords, 97 keywords met the threshold and were ranked by occurrence frequency. Finally, we obtained a visual keyword co-occurrence map that groups the most popular topics into clusters according to their strength of linkages and displays research developments over time.

Table 7 shows the most popular topics in translation studies of children’s literature. As expected, “children’s literature” and its synonyms “literature for children,” “children’s and youth literature,” and “children’s classics” topped the list with a frequency of 80, closely followed by “translation(s)”. It is also unsurprising that “literary translation,” “translation of children’s literature,” and “translation for children” were on the list. These high-frequency keywords indicate that the articles are the output of translation studies of children’s literature. Second, the high-frequency keywords “picture book(s)” and “fairy tale(s)” specify the types of children’s literature under investigation, suggesting the diversity of children’s books in the market. Besides, the high-frequency keywords, including “foreignization,” “domestication,” “adaptation,” and “translation strategies,” reflect scholars’ focus on how translators render children’s literature from one language into another. Moreover, the high-frequency keywords, including “ideology,” “reception,” “censorship,” “polysystem (theory),” “culture,” and “sociology of translation,” are possible perspectives from which scholars try to interpret particular phenomena of translated children’s literature. In addition, keywords, including “illustration,” “multimodality,” and “dubbing,” indicate that scholars have paid attention to not only the verbal but also the non-verbal and the relationship between the verbal and the non-verbal. Finally, keywords, including “South Africa,” “Harry Potter,” and “Hans Christian Andersen,” show popular countries/ regions from or into which children’s literature is translated, popular children’s books, and popular children’s writers in translation studies of children’s literature.

Figure 2 describes the co-occurrence network of keywords in translation studies of children’s literature. The network provides three types of information. First, it indicates the occurrence frequency of keywords: the more prominent a keyword appears in the network, the higher its occurrence frequency. And it confirms what Table 7 reveals. Second, it shows the strength of linkages between topics. Specifically, aside from translation and children’s literature, domestication features prominently with related topics including foreignization, translation norms, dubbing, manipulation, censorship, and cultural context adaptation. Literary translation features prominently alongside associated topics including ideology, picture books, multimodality, and ambiguity. Ideology is prominent with related topics including adaptation, reception, manipulation, censorship, picturebooks, identity, culture, and polysystem theory. Censorship is prominent with associated topics including dubbing, manipulation, domestication, adaptation, ideology, and polysystem theory. Picturebook is prominent with relevant topics including adaptation, culture, illustration, and multimodality. Third, it illustrates research developments over time: keywords are colored differently based on the year of publication, and as the color bar in the bottom right corner shows, those that have appeared recently are more yellow. Compared with topics such as rewriting, manipulation, translation norms, and ideology, topics including translation techniques, multimodality, gender, publishing, and intersemiotic translation are hotspots in recent studies.

In Methodology of Translation Studies: An Introduction, Mu^[19] categorizes types of translation studies into theoretical research and empirical research. Theoretical research defines concepts, interprets or reinterprets ideas, and analyzes and makes connections between existing concepts or theories to advance a new theoretical position. On the other hand, empirical research attempts to answer specific research questions based on data collected through methods such as observation and experiment. Of the 237 articles under investigation, 226 articles are empirical research articles while 11 articles are theoretical research articles, suggesting that empirical research has far outnumbered theoretical research in translation studies of children’s literature.

Research methods are the systematic tools used in the collection of data or evidence for analysis or interpretation to facilitate the understanding of a research topic. The common research methods in translation studies include observation, literature review, questionnaire, interview, experiment, corpus-based method, and mixed method.^[19] Among the corpus of 237 articles, 32 articles adopted the mixed method, 2 articles adopted the literature review method, 1 article adopted the interview method.

And the remaining 202 articles adopted the observation method, which indicates the predominance of the observation method in translation studies of children’s literature. Besides, six of the 202 articles that adopted the observation method are quantitative research, answering the research questions by collecting and analyzing numerical data.

Based on the 237 articles collected from WoS, this article presents a comprehensive overview of translation studies of children’s literature. Using bibliometric methods, it has produced several key findings that bear important implications. The first is that translation studies of children’s literature has experienced an upward trend in recent years. Nevertheless, this field is still underdeveloped, as evidenced by the low proportion of articles on children’s literature translation published in the four most productive journals specializing in translation studies, including Meta, Perspectives, Babel, and Target. For example, since its first publication on children’s literature translation in 1998, Perspectives has so far published 718 articles on various areas of translation studies, but only 2.786% of the articles are on children’s literature translation. Given this situation, it might be suggested that more special issues in this field should be proposed and published to boost its development, because the double volume that Meta dedicated to translating children’s literature and translating for children in 2003 contributed almost a tenth of the articles under investigation and many of them are highly cited.

Second, the corpus of 237 articles under investigation originated from 43 countries/regions, suggesting translation studies of children’s literature is not only flourishing in the most productive countries/regions listed in Table 1, but is also attracting academic attention in other countries/regions. The growing interest in this field worldwide may be explained by the fact that children’s literature is no longer peripheral within the literary system. Nonetheless, the 43 countries/regions under investigation represent about a fifth of the total number of countries/regions in the world, and translation studies of children’s literature remains a research gap in many countries/regions. It is suggested that scholars in these countries/regions might seek cooperation with their peers in those most productive countries/regions.

Third, many of the most productive institutions in Table 2 made the list due to the collective efforts of their scholars in this field, and they can be regarded as the powerhouses of translation studies of children’s literature. It is with these institutions that scholars in those countries/regions where this field remains underdeveloped can seek cooperation. It should also be noted that five of the most productive institutions made the list because of a single scholar’s sustained commitment to this field. These institutions might take measures, such as establishing institutes of translation studies of children’s literature and holding regular seminars, to promote themselves as powerhouses of this field.

Fourth, the most productive authors in Table 3 usually contributed articles on children’s literature translation independently, resulting in a large proportion of single-authored articles. This shows the lack of cooperation between scholars in translation studies of children’s literature, which accords with the current situation of translation studies in general, as only 16% of the 64,240 entries registered from 1961-2015 in the BITRA database are co-authored contributions.^[20] However, cooperation between scholars would enrich their research perspectives and allow them to explore some intriguing phenomena in children’s literature translation. For example, the most productive author, Haidee Kotze, contributed eight articles in this field, and most of her articles focus on translation phenomena in the context of South Africa. However, her article “Explicitation in Children’s Literature Translated from English to Chinese: A Corpus-based Study of Personal Pronouns”, co-authored with Zhang Xiaomin and Fang Jing, discusses the phenomenon of explicitation in translated Chinese children’s literature. Her cooperation with two scholars who have conducted extensive research on children’s literature translation in the Chinese context allowed her to extend the research context beyond South Africa.

Fifth, although MonTI and Ilha do Desterro a Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies published articles on children’s literature translation in only one year, they were still ranked among the most productive journals in this field. This was because they dedicated special issues to children’s literature translation. In addition, as discussed above, the high productivity of Meta in this field was partly due to the special issue it published in 2003. Therefore, it is suggested that if a journal intends to enhance its academic influence in this field, it should dedicate special issues to children’s literature translation.

Sixth, the research developments shown in Figure 2 indicate that multimodality and intersemiotic translation have been popular topics in recent years, suggesting that interdisciplinary research is on the rise in translation studies of children’s literature. With the flood of digital information technology, multimodality, defined as “the use of several semiotic modes in the design of a semiotic product or event, together with the particular way in which these modes are combined”^[21] has become a key feature of meaning expression, interpretation, and reception. It is no exception to children’s literature. Several of the 237 articles under investigation discuss non-verbal elements in children’s literature translation from a semiotic perspective.^[22] However, compared with other fields of translation studies, interdisciplinary research in translation studies of children’s literature is still underdeveloped. Hence, scholars in this field should step up collaboration with scholars in other disciplines, such as psychology and communication science.

Figure 2:
Co-occurrence Network of Keywords in Translation Studies of Children’s Literature.

Seventh, theoretical research and empirical research should receive equal attention in translation studies of children’s literature. Generally speaking, theoretical research can guide the direction of empirical research and enrich the scope of empirical research. On the other hand, empirical research can confirm or falsify the hypotheses proposed by theoretical research, amend existing theories, and propose new theories. Unfortunately, the number of theoretical researches in the corpus of 237 articles is disproportionately low. Therefore, scholars in this field should conduct more theoretical research that can be based on existing empirical research. Moreover, most of the articles that adopted the observation method are qualitative research. Sometimes, the collection, analysis, and interpretation of materials can be highly subjective in qualitative research, and the findings can be difficult to verify and replicate, which compromises both the theoretical and practical implications of the research. Thus, more quantitative research should be encouraged to complement qualitative research in translation studies of children’s literature.

Finally, the findings of this article demonstrate that bibliometric analysis can be a valuable tool to gain insight into research trends in translation studies of children’s literature. However, it is necessary to note that no single bibliometric indicator is sufficient to offer a complete picture of research trends, and that various bibliometric indicators need to be examined. For example, as shown in this article, some of the most productive authors in Table 3 do not contribute any of the most influential articles in Table 5. Therefore, both indicators need to be taken into account to accurately assess an author’s scholarly impact in this field. Besides, given the subjective decisions involved in bibliometric analysis, particularly decisions about what to include in the analysis, and the rapid development of translation studies of children’s literature, more bibliometric analyses should be carried out to substantiate the validity of this article and to keep the academia informed of the latest developments in this field.