On this page I raise three sensitive issues: the difficulty of authentic translation from one culture to another; the danger of misrepresentation when outsiders -- especially members of a dominant cultural group -- tell other people's stories; and the association of folktales themselves with childhood. This certainly is not an exhaustive overview of the problem, but I hope the examples and sources are representative and will support discussion. 

Can folk tales be translated?

Translation can mean not only finding the right words, but making decisions about the shape of a story and about how much cultural context needs to be explained -- or omitted -- for the sake of an audience. 

Ashley Bryan once raised the question of whether African folk tales could really be translated for an audience of American children. Even if a literal translation was possible, he said, it wouldn't be marketable, because the conventions of African stories are different. The sense of what makes a beginning, middle, and end is different. Given a literal translation of a good African story, an American audience might say, "Huh? Is that all? Where's the story?" 

It is not just African stories that have their own shapes. 

So a translator has to ask, how much adaptation is ethical? Our object in telling a story may be partly to give listeners a better sense of the culture it represents. Yamazaki (2002), noting that American and European translators take much greater liberties than Japanese translators in changing children's stories to make them more familiar to young readers, argues that we are losing an opportunity -- we are not sheltering our children from the challenge of learning to understand the unfamiliar. But authors, publishers, and storytellers alike fear that listeners will stop listening if the story is incomprehensible. In making the story accessible, how much do we risk falsifying it, making it less representative of the culture? 

Can cultural outsiders get it right?

The shape of a story is closely connected to its cultural meanings. For instance, the conventions of nineteenth-century European romanticism and twentieth-century American fantasy are clearly contrasted in Andersen's "Little Mermaid" and the Disney film adaptation. In Andersen's version, the nameless mermaid never marries the prince. Her sisters bring her a knife, so she can slay him on his wedding knight and return to the sea; but she chooses to die herself. As she casts away her last chance at life, she is greeted by the daughters of the air and given a chance to win instead a human soul and eternal life. The struggle between good and evil in this story is internal. In the Disney version, evil is externalized: a power-hungry witch disguises herself as a beautiful rival to win Ariel's prince. The Disney formula overlies Andersen's original story and changes its meaning completely. 

Andersen was European. Concerns about cultural misrepresentation are intensified in the case of multicultural literature and media. Fang, Fu, and Lamme (1999) find "much to applaud in the current interest among literacy educators in multicultural literature," which "can be seen as part of the democratic process that aims at giving minority cultures a voice. . . ." But they warn,

these minorities often do not have the political or economic power to represent themselves, and, as a result, they have to be represented by others (i.e., the dominant culture) who imitate and simulate their cultural voices. In fact, current multicultural books about minorities are written predominantly by EuroAmerican authors from an outsider's perspective.  

Mo and Shen (2000) discuss the misrepresentation of medieval Chinese culture in Disney's Mulan.  The filmmakers did not have time to absorb "the central code of Chinese culture," and "lacked the sense of an organic cultural context." Mo and Shen are dismayed by the vulgarization of the story: "The filmmakers of Mulan rob the story of its soul and in its place they put jokes, songs, and scary effects." Since the story of Mulan is not European, racial stereotyping can contribute to cultural estrangement: "In the past, because of the slapstick gimmicks he used, Walt Disney got away with his racism without directly offending the minorities he stereotyped in his animated films. More importantly, at that time minorities did not have the power to control their own image." 

Cultural misrepresentation is not limited to movies. Smolkin and Suina (1997) see Gerald McDermott's award-winning Arrow to the Sun as "an artistic triumph" but "a multicultural failure." One issue: at least some Pueblos believe the Kachina must not be seen -- either dancing, or as dolls or paintings -- except in the context of the sacred dance. Further, Mendoza and Reese (2001), quoting Reese and Caldwell-Wood (1997) and Nodelman (1988), note that "kivas are places of ceremony and instruction, not places of trial," and that McDermott's stylized adaptation of Pueblo designs misrepresents kiva art. This Caldecott Award-winning picture book is thus deeply disturbing to cultural insiders. Possible ways of dealing with the problem, however, raise questions about censorship and pedagogy.   

Even a book by a cultural insider can disturb other insiders when it is presented to children by an outsider. When stories address sensitive issues, those concerned may care as much about the context within they are mediated as about the stories themselves. Nappy Hair, by Carolivia Herron, celebrates a small girl's gloriously spiraling hair. It's set at a family picnic, where a doting grandfather praises that hair (and its owner) in a series of hyperbolic variations, and a chorus of mildly shocked relatives answers in traditional call and response style. When a white school teacher read it aloud to multiethnic children, they loved it -- but their parents protested. For more viewpoints, see Dr. Herron's own web site (http://www.carolivia.org/), and also Kay Vandergrift's (http://scils.rutgers.edu/~kvander/nappyhair.html). 

All these issues bear on the telling of folk tales. The old librarians warned new story tellers against affecting accents -- it could sound too much like mockery. But today's librarians have to worry about more than accents. By telling a poorly translated or adapted folk tale, we could unwittingly communicate cultural misconceptions or racial stereotypes. Even by telling a good one at the wrong time, we could ruffle cultural sensitivities. Storyteller Joseph Bruchac (1997) warns that some Native American tales are "only to be told at a certain time of the year and never . . . in the light of day," and that "to mention the names of certain characters in stories -- Coyote, for example -- outside of the stories is an invitation to bad luck."

Does storytelling empower? 

We worry that poorly translated and adapted folk tales may no longer be representative of the cultures that birthed them -- that they may have gathered stereotypes and misconceptions as they passed through the minds and mouths of cultural outsiders -- and that cultural information which could have given them deeper meaning has been misunderstood or lost in transmission. One more thing to worry about: in our mainstream society, is folklore itself too strongly associated with childhood? It is not just that we tell the stories to children. At least since the Grimm Brothers, folk tales have sometimes been seen as the archaic survivals of less advanced cultures -- echoes of the childhood of humanity. 

Andrew Lang, whose rainbow of "Fairy Books" delighted children a century ago, popularized stories from different lands. In the preface to his Violet Fairy Book, he explained why fairy tales were the natural property of children: 

These stories are as old as anything that men have invented. They are narrated by naked savage women to naked savage children. They have been inherited by our earliest civilized ancestors, who really believed that beasts and trees and stones can talk if they chose and behave kindly or unkindly. The stories are full of the oldest ideas of ages when science did not exist, and magic took the place of science. . . . 

Then learned men collected and printed the country people's stories, and these we have translated to amuse children. Their tastes remain like the tastes of their naked ancestors, thousands of years ago, and they seem to like fairy tales better than history, poetry, geography, or arithmetic, just as grown-up people like novels better than anything else.

Lang's blunt condescension toward children, "savages," and "country people" sounds quaint now, but maybe we still have a tendency to bracket childhood (our personal past) and folklore (our race's intellectual past), seeing both as charming and harmless.

Cai (1998) warns against a celebration of diversity that assumes "the mainstream culture in which we live is essentially fair and suggests that we 'travel' to as many cultures as possible to learn from them. . . . This tourist's view of multiculturalism is idealistic at best and deceptive at worst, glossing over the grim reality of conflicts between races, classes, genders, and other social groups." Informing children about different cultures does not always empower them, he suggests. The "so-called four f's: food, festival, fashion, and folklore" may be "informative and interesting, [but] they do not deal with cultural conflicts, and many of them are somewhat superficial." Cai argues powerfully for multicultural literature that promotes "equity for the oppressed groups." Can folk tales told to children help do this, or are they too far removed from the realities of contemporary life?

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