La traduction des contes de fées

This paper aims at reflecting upon the translation of fairy tales into Portuguese, more specifically about forty versions of the tale Little Red Riding Hood, published in Brazil since 1953. Trying to analyze the particularities of the several translations, each was compared to Perrault’s French model and to the Grimm Brothers’ German model. Such a research led me into the following conclusion: in place of the traditional tale, children are offered gross adaptations of the classical story, marked, in its vast majority, by the omission of scenes that are important to the narrative in favor of descriptions that idealize the child’s universe. The emphasis on the moralizing tone and the oversimplification of the language are also characteristics of these translations, traits that presuppose a naïve reader, feeble and incompetent, very different from today’s children who have gradually been inserted in the computer universe and exposed to the national and international problems of an era of Globalization.