Turning our giggles into global gags: Translating humorous Australian kids’ books
Dr Lara Cain Gray

Recently, the NCACL was thrilled to take delivery of a large international collection donated by beloved children’s writer Andy Griffiths, including the ‘Treehouse series’, created with illustrator Terry Denton. With 11 sequels, in multiple formats, in many languages, it is one of Australia’s most successful children’s series, and a highly successful export. As NCACL carefully adds these multilingual books to the collection, it’s worth considering the effort that must have gone on behind the scenes to carry this very Australian, very funny, series to other territories.

Translating Australian children’s books into other languages is a complex task that involves a nuanced understanding of cultural context, literary style, and the perceived reading tastes and abilities of young readers. The very things we often cherish about humorous children’s books are exactly what makes them hard to translate: like rhyme, word play, metaphors, and onomatapeia. All of these feature heavily in Griffith’s work, which has been praised for encouraging children to learn to read while they love to read.

Haruno Nakai, the Japanese translator of the Treehouse series, says that it’s not just individual words, but things like differences in social structures and the ways in which young people tease each other that were factors for consideration in her work. “Some of the jokes were kind of insulting,” she recalls, “so I changed or modified them for Japanese readers.” Nakai says that some books simply can’t be released in Japan because the jokes are not universally funny, but she enjoys solving the puzzle when she can.

The Treehouse books also capture young imaginations with quirky, faux-childlike illustrations, often creating very busy pages with text flying in all directions around increasingly chaotic landscapes. Jan Moeller was the German translator of the Worst Week Ever series, by Eva Amores and Matt Cosgrove, a similarly hilarious series for junior readers, that relies heavily on the interplay of words and pictures.

“The words in German are often longer than their English counterparts,” says Jan, “[but] in a comic book/novel hybrid like Worst Week Ever, the drawings dictate the whole layout. The entire composition of the pages is fixed, which means that even when I’m translating the regular narrative text next to the illustrations, I have to make sure the paragraphs in the translation don’t contain even a single line more than the original paragraphs.”

Translating humorous children’s literature, therefore, is a balancing act between linguistic accuracy, cultural sensitivity, and reader engagement. It demands not only technical skill but a willingness to adapt creatively while respecting the original work.

Apart from raising reader interest, linguistic humour builds and stretches young readers’ literacy abilities and vocabularies, without feeling like homework. In Worst Week Ever, lead character Justin Chase’s father Harold is a great lover of nicknames. JuJu Choo Choo, Jay Cee, and Judge Choozy are just a few examples, each of which is culturally loaded as well as reliant on sound patterns and double meanings.

“I have compiled almost sixty in a separate Word document, just to keep track of them all, and their translations,” says Stéphanie L. de Miranda, the series’ Norwegian translator. “The problem is that idiomatic expressions tend to use different images from language to language.” In the French edition, for example, we see Juju Choo Choo (train noise) exchanged for Juju Chouchou (darling, or favourite) – a culturally aligned exchange that still retains the cheeky ‘Dad humour’ of the original.

“Unfortunately, sometimes you just have to let go of the original joke and talk (or write) around it. But it is so satisfying to find a proper solution that’s fun and feels organic as well!” says Anouk Abels-van den Boogaart, Dutch translator of humorous Australian picture books, like those of Laura and Philip Bunting, as well as the globally popular Dog Man series. “I always think the vibe and the sense of humour of an author need to be intact. That is the most important thing and trumps being 100% faithful to the original wording.”

Translation is rarely a straightforward case of swapping word-in-language-A for word-in-language- B, particularly when it comes to humour. Languages and cultures evolve under many influences, some global, some very much local. Consequently, what we find funny is quite often culturally specific. When funny books travel around the world, it is the research, creativity, and close attention to detail of a skilled translator that brings a smile to the faces of each new room of readers.

Dr Lara Cain Gray has built her multi-discipline career across librarianship, teaching and research. She currently curates diverse multilingual book collections with non-profit education publisher Library For All. She is a book reviewer, literary prize judge, public speaker, and author of ‘The Grown-Up’s Guide to Picture Books’.

 

See also:
Lara Cain Gray – Blog and Writing
Beyond Words: The Complexity of Translating Australian Picture Books – NCACL Blog written by Dr Lara Cain Gray
Not Just English – NCACL Blog written by Christopher Cheng, NCACL Ambassador

Note: NCACL Cataloguing pending for the Treehouse series translated by Haruno Nakai.

Posted by: NCACL | Published: 01 Sep 2025