The Law of the Jungle and the Law of God: Translating Kipling's The Jungle Books into Italian

Adaptation seems to be the key word concerning the study of children‘s literature in translation. Since the beginning, different levels of adaptation have been identified and these entail from changing some small details to deleting or modifying entire parts of a story for children, on the presupposition that children‘s literature should have a didactic role and had to be used to teach children. This was particularly true in the past and many books, which underwent a process of adaptation, passed from being originally written for adults to becoming children‘s classics, see Gulliver‘s Travels in many translations in different times. The current study intends to analyse the translation of Kipling‘s Jungle Books in its translation in Italian in 1928, the second in order of time, which shows a certain degree of adaptation that permeates the translation into two instances: omission and addition. This becomes particularly relevant since the translation seems to be faithful to its original, by retaining the content, the style, names and places of the English version.