13 Playing with Language, Food, and PicturesIdeology and Cultural Adaptations in the Spanish Translation of the Captain Underpants Series

Teresa Asiain

Captain Underpants (CU), in Spanish translation, is an extremely pop-ular series that has sold almost a million copies in Spain. Enjoyed by children, teachers, librarians, and the general public, the books are con-sidered neither rude nor offensive, nor are they perceived as advocating disrespectful behavior. In fact, the Spanish CU series has not been subject to any of the criticism faced in the United States where, for the past 15 years, the CU series has appeared in numerous occasions on the Ameri-can Library Association’s annual Banned Books lists, topping the list as most challenged in 2013 (American Library Assoc.). It could be argued that the two countries possess different attitudes toward the books. Spain, at first glance, might seem more welcoming and less judgmental when it comes to subversive texts. However, as the following analysis will show, the history of the translations of these books highlights significant lin-guistic and cultural differences between the English and Spanish versions, including an almost complete deletion of the dual adult and child read-ership common in most children’s books, mistranslations of humor, mis-representations of foods, and irregularities between the Spanish text and American illustrations. The CU books have met with a very different recep-tion in Spain because, in many ways, they are very different books.

The Adventures of Captain Underpants, the first book of the CU series, was published in Spain as Las Aventuras del Capitán Calzoncillos in February 2000, three years after Dav Pilkey’s text was first published in the United States. The Spanish translations belong to the collection El Barco de Vapor and are owned by the publishing house Grupo SM, a highly respected company that is proud to promote the habit of reading among children. The CU (in Spanish) books are part of the ‘Serie Azul’ intended for read-ers between seven and nine years old. ‘Serie Azul’ is described as includ-ing “books for children who read quite well and yet have some difficulty from time to time. The books include full color illustrations to make reading entertaining” (“Catálogos SM”). Miguel Azaola is the translator of the first ten CU books so far translated for a Spanish audience.

The success of the CU series is not surprising, given the popularity of trans-lated English language titles for Spanish children over the past decade. The

186 Teresa Asiain

Horrid Henry, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and CU series have all sold millions of copies, relegating books originally published in Spanish to a secondary posi-tion. When the Spanish child reader grows older, the tendency is even more pronounced; blockbusters such as the Twilight Saga, Divergent, and The Hunger Games series dominate the bestseller lists in Spain. In fact, forty- three percent of all children’s books in Spain are translations; of these, the vast majority are translated from English (Ministerio de Cultura). This number is large compared to the percentage of translated texts published in the United States and the United Kingdom, which is about three percent in both nations (Venuti 12).

In Spain, children’s literature is by far the most translated sector of the market. Unlike other European countries such as France, Germany, or the United Kingdom, Spain does not have a longstanding tradition of producing children’s literature. As Carmen Bravo- Villasante explains in her sociohis-torical study, it is not possible to talk about a Spanish children’s literature before the eighteenth century other than isolated works such as Christmas carols, lullabies, legends, and pedagogical treatises (47). Spain has histor-ically relied on translations to fill the need for children’s literature in the publishing market.

Translation, though, is a fraught process. As it is with any translated text, a focus on the translator brings issues of ideology to the surface and puts studies of translator behavior and intentions center stage. Translators are interpreters of culture whose discursive presence is always apparent. There-fore, in the same way that David Rudd advocates for a Bakhtin- inflected approach to analyzing children’s literature in which child readers are viewed as actively involved in negotiating meaning rather than as passively taught (294), translators must be considered as active agents in the process of cre-ating meaning. Translating a book is never a one- person project; it is an ongoing compromise by the agents, author, translator, publishing house, and the readers. Children’s literature in translation calls attention to the transla-tors’ attitudes about childhood and children’s literature, especially when the devices normally available to facilitate the dialogue between one language and another, between cultures, and between readers, such as footnotes, epi-logues, and prefaces, are omitted. The ways in which ranges of meaning are narrowed, expanded, or refracted in the process of translation and the ways in which translation affects the young readers’ understanding of the text must be considered as part of a dialogical and dynamic system. When a chil-dren’s text is subversive, challenges authority, or mocks social norms, very often from a humorous point of view, it is even more vulnerable to change. This is certainly the case with the CU series.

One of the biggest challenges a translator faces is the translation of humor because of the close links between humor, identity, and culture (Maher 141). Humor is found in all societies and cultures, but there is nothing that is universally humorous. The concept of what people find funny is created by linguistic, geographical, sociocultural, and personal boundaries (Chiaro 5).

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 187

One common feature of humor in all societies, though, is that it is consid-ered to be a liberating element. Freud, for instance, saw in jokes and humor an act similar to dreams in the sense that both are controlled by and give voice to unconscious desires, repressed feelings, and anxieties. Humor is often revealed to encourage criticism and reflection about the prevailing sys-tems of power, and it can be a discursive tool used by both sides in a struggle between dominant and resistive forces. Humor in the American CU series is certainly related to power and authority: in a carnivalesque way, the adults who represent authority (the principal, the police, and teachers) become the butt of the joke when they are portrayed as sadistic, cruel, evil, stupid, and silly. However, this power struggle, and thus the subversive humor, has been diminished in the Spanish translation.

We see the decline of subversion in several aspects of the books, most notably in the way characters are renamed. By creatively employing names, authors can easily hint at a character’s personality, habits, or physical fea-tures that lead readers to make necessary judgments about them (Lefevere 39). In the case of the CU series, Pilkey uses puns and word- play in creating the names of the teachers and school staff, making rude and offensive hom-onyms for each one of them: Mr Krupp sounds like Mr. Crap; Mr. Recter, the guidance counselor, sounds like “misdirected”; and names such as Mrs. DePoint and Mr. Morty Fyed allude to “misses the point” and “mortified.” But descriptive names are dependent on language and context. In this case, translator Miguel Azaola could not translate the names literally as the play on words would not have made sense in Spanish. He has in some cases kept language playful and created new names for adults related to their position at school: for instance, Miss Creant and Mrs. DePoint, the lunch ladies, become Sra. Masmaizena (“Mrs. More- cornstarch”) and Sra. Aldente (“Mrs. Al- Dente”). These names, despite creating different wordplay, do not imply a negative connotation or a rude remark as the original ones do and therefore lose part of the subversive potential. They might not be as obvious to the child reader either. In a casual survey I conducted at a Spanish school, only a few children were able to anticipate what profession Sra. Masmai-zena and Sra. Aldente might have, and neither name was perceived as very funny.1 Furthermore, the majority of the playful names in the CU series are replaced with old-fashioned comedic names, such as Señor Carrasquilla, Señora Pichote, and Señora Depresidio, losing their dual meanings and an important source of humor.

The problem of translating expressive language resides in the idiomatic differences between the two languages. As Emer O’Sullivan states when dis-cussing whether it was even possible for Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) to have Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland translated into German: “Word play on the highest level, linguistic jokes which can’t be translated easily, poems, parodies; the English language not only provides the context for much of his (Dodgson’s) humor, it itself is frequently its very object” ( 48–49). The Spanish language is not nearly as rich in homophones as English, most of

188 Teresa Asiain

them restricted to our voiceless “h” and the homophones “b” and “v.” For instance, in the ninth book, the main characters of the series George and Harold create “The Adventures of Dog Man,” featuring a superhero dog who fights crime. Pilkey plays with the dog’s onomatopoeic expressions and their homophones and homonyms that help him communicate with humans: “Roof Roof” means that the thief is on the roof; “Pant Pant Pant” implies that he is wearing pants; “Bark Bark” suggests that the police need to climb the bark of a tree to catch him; and “Whine Whine” indicates that he wants to celebrate his victory with wine (Tinkletrousers 119–34). However, the chances of maintaining a homophone that conveys the same meaning as the target language are pretty slim, so the translator has to resort to other linguis-tic devices in order to maintain the original meaning. Here the Spanish dog keeps repeating the onomatopoeia “Aúuuu,” and Azaola has tried to keep language playful by using the words Aún (“still”), Raúl (a name), and Azul (“blue”) to help catch the thief, indicating that the thief’s name is Raúl, that he is still in the area, and that he is wearing something blue. The Spanish text has a lower degree of success than the original text because it does not have a clear connection to the pictures in the comic book: the thief may be described as being dressed in blue, but the illustrations are still only in black and white.

Wordplay is one of the most difficult aspects of cultural intertextuality; the translatability of allusive wordplay, which can imply lexical, grammati-cal, or situational modification, depends on the extent to which the allusion is dependent upon its own specific culture (González 106). The choice of an appropriate translation strategy is therefore crucial for the comic dimension to be effective in a new language context. Literal translation leads, in most cases, to an obvious loss in the target text. For instance, when George and Harold confuse the words “placenta” and “placebo,” it has a comic effect. The main characters explain the “placebo effect” as, “if [Captain Under-pants] believes that fabric softener will save him, then it probably will. I think it’s called ‘the Placenta Effect’” (Wicked 121, emphasis in original). In this case, “placenta” and “placebo” are also Spanish words with exactly the same meanings. In fact, the expression “el efecto placebo” is well known in the Spanish language and has the same meaning as in English. However, Azaola omitted the word “placenta” and translated the whole episode using a new play- on-words with sudigestión (“his/her digestion”) instead of sugestión (“suggestion”). There are other examples, too, where new plays- on-words are created during the translation process. In the same book, Pilkey plays with the idea of “reverse psychology.” Azaola did not technically trans-late the term properly (as psicología inversa), opting instead for psicología reversible (“reversible psychology”), which adds a humorous connotation that was not present in the original text. Thus, it is not an aversion to word-play that has caused the change from “placenta” to “sudigestion.” Instead, the most probable explanation is that the publishing house or translator felt uncomfortable using the word “placenta” for its biological connotations related to giving birth, a prudish decision rather than a linguistic one.

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 189

Another major challenge when translating humor is the presence of irony, satire, and sarcasm. Dav Pilkey uses satire to ridicule, to prick pretensions, to expose hypocrisy, and to show that appearances can often be deceiving (Blake 16). In her article, “The Feast of Misrule,” Jackie Stallcup states that the CU books are an example of satire, a genre that can function in both conservative and subversive modes (177). Satire has been only partly main-tained in the Spanish versions of these books, mostly due to the lack of accessible cultural allusions. For instance, Jerome Horwitz, the name of the school in Pilkey’s version, is a name with two different meanings in American culture: it could refer to a renowned American scientist who helped develop a drug to treat AIDS or, more likely, to The Three Stooges’ Curly Howard (born Jerome Horwitz). Knowledge of either public figure adds layers of meaning— and if the latter, humor— to the name of the elementary school in the books. Jerónimo Chumillas is used in the Spanish versions, a silly name not related to a Spanish public figure at all. It would have been extremely easy to choose a famous Spanish scientist or performer that would have conveyed the same satirical effect, or even to create a new funny name using Spanish wordplay. Instead, the translator has again domesticated the name of the school employing an old- fashioned name, a preference that seems to take the double meanings and the humor away. Perhaps, it could be said that those involved in the Spanish translations lack trust in their anticipated child readership.

In the eighth book of Pilkey’s series there is an illustration that depicts a sign saying, “‘Schools is educationy’: A message from our president” (Potty 75). This might be a direct way of criticizing or parodying the former Ameri-can president George W. Bush and his frequent grammatical mistakes. How-ever, this joke is contextually bound to the American president and would not much make sense to a young Spanish reader. In both the American and Spanish versions, though, the adult reader might in fact get the joke quite easily. But humor designed to make the adult reader chuckle is one of the most remarkable losses in the Spanish translation of CU. Azaola may liter-ally translate the references, but he does not translate the winks that Pilkey gives to his adult readers in such a way that Spanish adults will find similar pleasure recognizing familiar texts. Translators may not be completely bicul-tural, which means that they may miss cultural references that are deeply entrenched in the source culture (Epstein 138). Thus, references to popular American books older readers will recognize—“Are You There, God? It is Us, Fluffy and Cheeseball” (Poopypants 101), for example, is an obvious nod to Judy Blume’s Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret— are not avail-able for readers in the Spanish translation. The chances of a Spanish trans-lator knowing about this 1970s American book are slim. And because the adult humor is almost entirely lost, Azaola did not attempt to substitute a title that might have been equally iconic and thus recognizable to Span-ish adults. Instead he chose the literal translation, as he did with “When Kipper Gets Angry— Really, Really Angry” (Tinkletrousers 215), “Furious

190 Teresa Asiain

George” (92), and “Harold and the Purple Ballpoint Pen” (Talking 105), all references to American canonical texts not typically recognizable to Spanish readers (of any age).

Pilkey states that CU books are for a very wide age group—“ The reading level is ‘officially’ ages 7 to 10, but I’d like to think the interest level would be more like ages 4 to 140” (“Book Fair”)—acknowledging that the adult reader may be interested in his literary work as much as the child reader. But the CU translation team rejects the idea of a dual addressee for this series and thus eliminates most of the jokes directed at adults. In an email inter-view, Azaola, to his credit, acknowledges the importance of dual audiences in children’s literature:

I am afraid that [the Spanish translations] do not have a ‘dual addressee’ … and therefore, move away from my ideal of books for children. I am convinced that the best books for children, even the books for the youngest, also bring great pleasure to the adult reader … I have serious doubts that this is the case in this collection. (Azaola)

The pleasure adult readers might take from these particular texts has been ignored, and the translations have lost much of the complexity of the originals.

Humor in Pilkey’s series is also intrinsically related to depictions and descriptions of food. As Roland Barthes explains, “food is a system of com-munication, a body of images, a protocol of usages, situations, and behavior” (21), binding it culturally to the country in which it originates. By breaking the social conventions of behavior and attitudes toward food, Pilkey cre-ates humorous situations that provoke delight in younger readers. Annette Wannamaker states that “food in the Captain Underpants books serves as a site for fantasies of power and control” (“The Attack of the Inedible Hunk” 244). When language becomes more playful and irreverent, food is used as a weapon (to be thrown at some kind of monster), as a magical potion that provokes physical changes, and as a tool to “gross out” and humiliate adult characters (243). The Spanish version, however, is not as excessive, playful, or subversive as the original. Part of the problem resides in the idiomatic differences between the two languages: “the fatty fried fish fritters flipped onto the first graders” (Pilkey, Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman 64) is an alliterative sentence that is difficult to pronounce. However, if you trans-late it into Spanish (los aceitosos buñuelos de pescado frito granizaron sobre los de primero) the result is just a long sentence that lacks the repetition of the “f” sound. Though a similar sentiment could have easily been created in Spanish, the translator decided to literally translate the sentence, losing the alliteration and reducing the humorous effect.

The quality of the food served— and its implied meaning— is also differ-ent. In the American series, fruit and vegetables rarely make an appearance, and when they do, humans never eat them. In the Spanish text, however,

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 191

menus are not only more appealing in the first place, but they are also con-siderably more substantial, comprised of a first and a second course, a des-sert, and a drink. In short, the Spanish version of CU offers a proper meal according to Spanish standards. The menus are also much healthier, always including a piece or two of fresh fruit. Food is thus more ordinary and less funny, and thus the characters’ reactions toward cafeteria food seem rather incongruous to Spanish readers. For instance, “cheese and lentil pot pies” (Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space 13) becomes in Spanish “[g]arlic soup, homemade meatballs, tropical pineapple, and tea” (my translation), a quite appetizing menu and definitively nothing to frown upon. School meals in Spain are healthier and more substantial than U.S. school lunches (and more expensive). Therefore, differing cultural attitudes towards food are portrayed in the books in a way that significantly affects their translation and makes this attempt at humor much less funny.

Carolyn Daniel states, “food narratives in children’s stories are often ‘grounded in playfulness’ and transgressive of adult food rules, not just in terms of ‘foodbungling tricks’ but also timing, sequence, quantity, and quality” (12). The playfulness of the food is intrinsically related to linguis-tic play, rendering them both as a means through which authority can be challenged. While the boys in the Spanish versions of CU also transform the menus posted in the school cafeteria by switching around letters, the resulting sentences on the notice board are less rude after being manipulated by Jorge and Berto. For instance, “Please don’t fart in a diaper” (Poopypants 29) becomes in Spanish, “a big shouting, fighting, and hitting competition” (Pipicaca 27, my translation) losing the scatological content and becoming less funny while increasing in violent content.

To be fair, though, scatological content is not missing from the Spanish CU. Digestion (and indigestion) of food is widely represented by descrip-tions of vomit, farts, and excrement in the CU series, serving the double function of emphasizing the physicality of readers’ bodies and of breaking a taboo, creating a comical and playful effect. Children everywhere are fre-quently scolded or punished for using bathroom words such as pee- pee, poo, boogers, or butthead; therefore, their use in a book can cause an adult’s disgust but a child reader’s thrill. In most cases, scatology in the CU series has been translated literally, which means that the words named above are in the Spanish text as well. After all, as Bakhtin explains, “the bodily element is deeply positive. It is presented … as something universal, representing all the people” (19). In this category, no scenes have been deleted or changed. The word “wedgie” is the only one that has been omitted, not as a form of censorship, but for lack of a cultural equivalent. In Spain, giving somebody a “wedgie” is not a common prank or a practical joke. Contextually bound as food is, the way food is portrayed in the Spanish CU series (as less excessive and less disgusting) inevitably affects the perception of the texts as less funny.

Language choice is a very important aspect of translation, but it is not the only one. Illustrated books like Early Readers are texts in which

192 Teresa Asiain

pictures convey content and meaning. Thus, the translation— or lack of translation— of the visual content can likewise be very influential and can change the overall perception of the text.2 In a series where almost every-thing related to language has been domesticated in the Spanish version, the reader can still see American flags, white- picket fences, American police cars, etc. In other words, the CU series in Spain is visually American but linguis-tically and culturally Spanish. Picture book translations and illustrated texts are often co- printed to save cost, but the translators’ choices are somewhat restricted due to the imposition of pictures. This seems especially awkward in the case of Early Readers that function to teach the newly literate to develop both verbal and visual literacy, to understand the text not only by itself, but also in its relation to its pictures and paratext. Oittinen states that “the visual appearance of a book always includes not only the illustration, but also the actual print, the shape and style of letters and headings, and the book’s entire layout; all these features influence the reader emotionally” (“The Verbal and the Visual” 102). Of course, this gets marred when cultur-ally bound semiotic systems are at odds with one another.

Take for example religious imagery in the CU series. In the fifth book, a wedding is going to be celebrated between Mr. Krupp and Ms. Ribble. In the original text, the pictures clearly convey that Mr. Krupp is Jewish, with a rabbi wearing a kippah and a tallit officiating at the wedding. Mr. Krupp is drawn wearing a kippah as well. Pilkey chooses very clearly to describe this wedding as Jewish. In the Spanish version the word “rabino” (the literal translation for “rabbi”) is not mentioned at all; instead, Azaola has chosen the word celebrante (“celebrant” in English), deleting from the text all mention of a Jewish ceremony, despite the obvious Jewish imagery. Here the urge to domesticate the text overwhelms the need for textual parity.

Of course, illustrations can provide translators some room for personal interpretation. For example, where the American version has a boy open-ing presents on December 25, following the American custom of open-ing presents on Christmas Day, in the Spanish version the calendar reads January 6, Epiphany, or Twelfth Night (El Día de los Reyes Magos), the date on which Catholics open their presents in Spain. Beyond domesticat-ing the text, though, the illustrations can be reinterpreted by a translator. Take for example the ninth book of the series, Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers, which was published in Spanish in the United States by Scholastic Español months before it was published in Spanish in Spain. The translator of the American Spanish version, Nuria Molinero, translates the name of the character Judge Fudgie McGrudge, whose gender is unclear in Pilkey’s version, as “Jueza Alicia Malicias” (Judge Alicia Perfidious), a female (Terrorífico Retorno 30). Incidentally, Azaola, using the same picture, assumes the judge is a man named “Sise-buto Sañudo” (the first name a reference to a Spanish King and the word “vicious”). Molinero’s change is welcome, given the criticism the CU series

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 193

has received for its portrayal of traditional gender roles and its depiction of girls and women.3

Molinero takes it a step further in toning down the negative portrayal of women in how she describes the cheerleaders. Pilkey describes them as “gos-sipy” (Tinkletrousers 176), but Molinero omits the adjective. The offensive statement, “the wide- eyed group of gossipy girls had been rendered unchar-acteristically speechless” (176), becomes, simply, “the girls were strangely speechless” (my translation). Later, when the cheerleaders find out about the ghost, Pilkey states, “The girls huddled together in a tight, shivering group as they tiptoed into the school” (206); however, Molinero chooses to not translate the fact that they were a tight, shivering group, and tones down their hysteria by saying, “The girls hugged, shaken, as they tiptoed into the school” (206, my translation). Also, on the next page, when the original text reads, “The cheerleaders screamed again” (207), the translator has deleted the whole sentence from the text, avoiding the repetition of screams and the depiction of the cheerleaders as hysterical and uncontrollable girls. Azaola, on the other hand, has literally translated these sentences, creating the same effect that Pilkey desired in the first place: to show a group of girls who are scared, gossipy, far from brave, and unable to control their screams of terror. In short, pictures may be insurmountable obstacles for translators because they are unable to change them, but they sometimes offer some opportunity for reinterpretation, which can maintain or challenge the ideologies of the source text.

Another such reinterpretation is in the translation of the comic books cre-ated in the series by George and Harold. In the original CU books, George and Harold create their own comics within the text, and they do it like children: with mistakes. They are, after all, newly literate themselves. Karen Coats argues that when children are learning to read, they find pleasure in interpreting and decoding the texts by themselves ( 59–76). Children find these mistakes amusing, as they are able to interpret the joke that the author is creating through misspellings. By contrast, the level of agency that the Spanish version concedes to children is much lower. When Jorge and Berto first write their comics, their grammar is perfect. In the second book of the series, however, the comic book includes the grammatical mistakes and mis-spellings. Without explanation, the main characters have become less accom-plished and write more like “real” children would. From the third to the tenth book— and this constantly changes within the different editions— the books adopt several methods of dealing with these mistakes: by correcting them, by leaving them in the translation, or by trying to teach the children how to spell by misspelling a word, crossing it out, and then writing it again correctly. This last option is in stark opposition to Pilkey’s intentions, as children are not only not amused but are also being taught how to spell, a change that portrays a didacticism not intended in the original.

The differences in the series’ covers set the tone for these narratives’ dis-tinct intentions. The first books, for example, both feature the same cover

194 Teresa Asiain

pictures, but the American cover’s title is lettered in a comic book style in big, capital, bold letters, whose shade is projected, making them gain some relief and appear two- dimensional. The big, white, bold letters hold the visual priority of the cover as much as the picture of the superhero stand-ing on top of a building, with George and Harold hanging off the rooftop. The Spanish cover page’s layout has a more formal look: the pictures are smaller and more information about the book’s publisher and its suitability for readers is offered. For example, the reader knows that the book belongs to the Blue Series and that it has been published by El Barco de Vapor whose logo is also pictured in the bottom left corner. Each cover also prints its edi-tion number in order to prove its sales success. The large letters are typed, lower- case, and not bolded, deleting any reference to comics from the cover. They are also significantly smaller, making the pictures have visual priority over the written text. In other words, the Spanish version is altogether much less visually playful, even less so than the Spanish text itself. It seems that even though the text has been translated, the publishers did not paratrans-late the visual elements on the cover, choosing a more didactic approach to it. To be sure, Azaola and the publishing house may make Spanish children laugh softly, but they do not create the guffaw intended by Pilkey.

Translators are just one cog in the translation machine, and their deci-sions are not always respected; their views about what children’s literature is and how it should be translated do not always tally with those of the publishing house they work for. The highly educational publishing house in charge of the CU series is more concerned about the didactic side of the books, even at the expense of their humorous content. As Azaola explains, a book goes through different persons responsible for its publication, and the different criteria applied are not always in accordance with those of the author and/or the translator:

Editors did not want to take the risk of schools not recommending these books, based on what teachers could consider grammatical mistakes. Therefore, in the new editions, they correct the mistakes (many of them quite funny, in my opinion), that were there in the first books … In a short time, all the books will be reprinted and no non-sense will be left, adhering to only one criterion: the one that I do not like. [emphasis in original, my translation]

El Barco de Vapor is a very didactic collection favored by teachers when recommending books for their students; and the educational reading busi-ness is a too large commercial niche to be lost due to some spelling mistakes. The editorial manipulation of a text may not, therefore, be the result of the translator’s skill or opinions at all. Translators must negotiate various pres-sures and constraints imposed on them by ideology, commissioning editors, and the publishing industry, and so it is important to raise awareness of the advantages of sharing the process of decision making with the editor, the

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 195

publisher, the translator, and ideally the author in all the different stages of a book’s production and translation. Educational norms and preconceived ideas of what young readers should enjoy also affect translations. The lin-guistic challenges posed by CU’s humor, the culturally charged depictions of food, and the American images inherent in the illustrations may cause dis-appointing changes in the translation, but the translated text should not be seen only as a failure or in terms of its differences from the source text, but as a new text that is in a complex, multifaceted dialogue with the original one.

Notes 1. The survey was conducted among 26 Spanish children (9 years old) who had

not read the books before at the mixed primary school Escuelas Pías de Tafalla (Spain).

2. Texts do not exist by themselves. If a text is to become real in the publishing world, it depends on paratexts. Gerard Genette has defined a paratext as “ . . . the means by which a text makes a book of itself and proposes itself as such to its readers” (261). The faculty of the University of Vigo (Spain) has widely stud-ied the translation of paratexts, because as far as “there can be no text without text, neither can there be a translation without corresponding paratranslation” (Yuste Frias 118).

3. For a more in depth analysis, see Annette Wannamaker’s chapter “The Battle of the Bionic Booger Boy, Bodily Borders and B.A.D. Boys: Pleasure and Abjection in the Captain Underpants Series” in Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection, and the Fictional Child.

Works CitedAmerican Library Association. “Top Ten Frequently Challenged Book Lists of the

21st Century.” Banned and Challenged Books: www.ala.org. Web. 29 May 2014.Azaola, Miguel. “RE: Capitan Calzoncillos.” Message to the author. 9 Oct. 2012.

Email.Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Cambridge, MA:

MIT P, 1973. Print.Barthes, Roland. “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption.”

Food and Culture: A Reader. Eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik. New York: Routledge, 1997. 20–27. Print.

Blake, Barry. Playing With Words: Humour in the English Language. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2007. Print.

Bravo- Villasante, Carmen. Historia de la Literatura Infantil Española. Madrid: Edi-torial Escuela Española, 1985. Print.

“Catalogos SM.” Catalogos SM. SM, n.d. Web. 02 June 2014.Chiaro, Delia. The Language of Jokes: Analysing Verbal Play. London: Routledge,

1992. Print.Coats, Karen. Looking Glasses and Neverlands: Lacan, Desire and Subjectivity in

Children’s Literature. Iowa City: U. of Iowa P., 2004. Print.Daniel, Carolyn. Voracious Children: Who Eats Whom in Children’s Literature.

New York: Routledge, 2006. Print.

196 Teresa Asiain

Epstein, B. J. Translating Expressive Language in Children’s Literature: Problems and Solutions. Oxford, UK and Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang, 2012. Print.

Genette, Gérard and Marie Maclean. “Introduction to the Paratext.” New Literary History 22.2 Spring (1991): 261–70. Web. 15 May 2014.

González Cascallana, Belén. “Translating Cultural Intertextuality in Children’s Lit-erature.” Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and Strategies. Eds. Jan Van Coillie and Walter P. Verschueren. Manchester, UK: St. Jerome, 2006. 97–110. Print.

Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting and Manipulation of Literary Fame. New York: Routledge, 1992. Print.

Maher, Brigit. “The Comic Voice in Translation: Dario Fo’s Accidental Death of an Anarchist.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 28.4 (2007): 376–79. Web. 10 Oct 2013.

Ministerio de Cultura, “La Traducción Editorial en España.” Ministerio De Cultura, Nov. 2010. Web. 15 May 2014.

Oittinen, Riitta. “The Verbal and the Visual: On the Carnivalism and Dialogics of Translating for Children.” The Translation of Children’s Literature: A Reader. Ed. Gillian Lathey. Ontario: Multilingual Matters, 2006. 84–141. Print.

———. Translating for Children. New York: Garland, 2000. Print.———. “Audiences and Influences: Multisensory Translations of Picturebooks.”

Whose Story? Translating the Verbal and the Visual in Literature for Young Read-ers. Eds. Maria Gonzalez Davies and Riitta Oittinen. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2008. Print.

O’Sullivan, Emer. “Comparing Children’s Literature.” German as a Foreign Lan-guage 2 (2002): 33–56. Web. 18 March 2014.

Pilkey, Dav. The Adventures of the Captain Underpants. New York: Scholastic, 1997. Print. Captain Underpants 1.

———. Las Aventuras del Capitán Calzoncillos. Trans. Miguel Azaola. Madrid: SM, 2000. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 1.

———. “Book Fair Author Spotlight on Dav Pilkey.” Scholastic Canada Book Fairs. Author and Illustrator Spotlight. Scholastic Canada, n.d. Web. 09 Jun 2014.

———. El Capitán Calzoncillos y el Contraataque de Cocoliso Cacapipí. Trans. Miguel Azaola and Xohana Bastida. Madrid: SM, 2013. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 9.

———. El Capitán Calzoncillos y la Furia de la Supermujer Macroelástica. Trans. Miguel Azaola. Madrid: SM, 2002. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 5.

———. El Capitán Calzoncillos y la Invasión de los Pérfidos Tiparracos del Espacio. Trans. Miguel Azaola. Madrid: SM, 2001. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 3.

———. El Capitán Calzoncillos y el Perverso Plan del Profesor Pipicaca. Trans. Miguel Azaola. Madrid: SM, 2001. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 4.

———. El Capitán Calzoncillos y el Terrorífico Retorno de Cacapipí. Trans. Nuria Molinero. New York: Scholastic, 2013. Print. Capitán Calzoncillos 9.

———. Captain Underpants and the Attack of the Talking Toilets. New York: Scho-lastic, 1999. Captain Underpants 2.

———. Captain Underpants and the Invasion of the Incredibly Naughty Cafeteria Ladies from Outer Space (and the Subsequent Assault of the Equally Evil Lunch-room Zombie Nerds). New York: Scholastic, 1999. Captain Underpants 3.

———. Captain Underpants and the Perilous Plot of Professor Poopypants. New York: Scholastic, 2000. Print. Captain Underpants 4.

Playing with Language, Food, and Pictures 197

———. Captain Underpants and the Preposterous Plight of the Purple Potty People. New York: Scholastic, 2006. Print. Captain Underpants 8.

———. Captain Underpants and the Terrifying Return of Tippy Tinkletrousers. New York: Scholastic, 2012. Print. Captain Underpants 9.

———. Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman. New York: Scholastic, 2001. Print. Captain Underpants 5.

———. “Dav Pilkey Discusses His ‘Captain Underpants’ Books.” Weekend All Things Considered. 20 Sept. 2003. Radio. Transcript. Web. 21 Sep 2012.

———. “Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants.” Scholastic.com. Captain Underpants. N.p., n.d. Web. 02 June 2014.

Rudd, David. “Children’s Literature and the Return to Rose.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35.3 (2012): 290–310. Web. 19 March 2012.

Stallcup, Jackie. “‘The Feast of Misrule’: Captain Underpants, Satire, and the Liter-ary Establishment.” Genre XLI (2008): 171–202. Print.

Venuti, Lawrence. Translator’s Invisibility. London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Print.

Wannamaker, Annette. “‘The Attack of the Inedible Hunk!’: Food, Language and Power in Captain Underpants.” Critical Approaches to Food in Children’s Liter-ature. Eds. Kara Keeling and Scott Pollard. New York: Routledge, 2009. 243–56. Print.

———. Boys in Children’s Literature and Popular Culture: Masculinity, Abjection and the Fictional Child. New York: Routledge, 2008. Print.

Yuste Frías, José. “Paratextual Elements in Translation: Paratranslating Titles in Children’s Literature.” Translation Peripheries. Paratextual Elements in Transla-tion. Eds. Anna Gil- Bajardí, Pilar Orero and Sara Rovira- Esteva. Bern, Switzer-land: Peter Lang, 2012. 117–34. Print.