The Little Prince

Abstract

This paper studies translations of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s The Little Prince into Hebrew and Arabic, genealogically related Semitic languages. The discussion in the paper focuses on three questions related to subjects already raised in the translation literature: What does the word count of any translated text contribute to translation study? How does comparing different translations of the same text into the same language contribute to translation research? Will translating one text into genealogically related languages reveal similarities between the translations? The research hypothesizes that (1) similarities and differences will be found between the translations, but (2) they will not affect target language rules. The main findings are that (1) total word sums were smaller in the translations than word sums in the source text. (2) The differences reflect the style and register considerations (formal versus daily lexical and structural elements) rather than grammatical issues. The research hypotheses appear to be correct, at least for these languages.