Raccontare la Polonia del secondo dopoguerra ai ragazzi. Le traduzioni italiane dei romanzi di Janusz Domagalik, Irena Jurgielewicz e Hanna Ożogowska

This essay examines Italian translations of three Polish novels for young adults, written and set in communist Poland of the 1960s. The analysis focuses on the problems related to the translation of the culture-specific elements of Polish reality in that historical period, almost completely unknown to the young readers in Italy. An in-depth contrastive study of the strategies applied by the translators takes into consideration different channels of the transfer from the source text to the target text. Ożogowska’s translation has been made directly from Polish by an Italian native speaker, Domagalik’s novel is a secondhand translation from German, and Jurgielewicz’s book has been translated into Italian twice: firstly by a tandem of a native Polish speaker and an Italian author of children’s books and later by a native Polish speaker without extensive translational practice. The comparison between the texts brings forward the importance of extratextual factors in the process of translation.