From the Periphery to the Centre of Marginality: Towards a Prolegomenon of Translating Children's Literature into Arabic

Studies which deal with the translation of children’s literature (CL) into Arabic are almost non-existent in the West. The situation is not much better in the Arab countries,1 in spite of the fact that translated works, mainly from English and
French, have been appearing with increasing regularity over the past decade and
a half. The aim here is not to provide an evaluation of these translated works,
currently under investigation elesewhere,2 but to establish a general outline, by
way of a prolegomenon, of some of the main headings under which a fully-fledged
work on the translation of CL into Arabic may be carried out. By necessity, this
article does not aim at exhaustive coverage, either in terms of depth or breadth, but to provide a set of signposts, a blueprint as it were, which may guide future research.