Translating Montessori: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

The books written by Dr. Maria Montessori along with her pedagogical method are gaining more and more popularity worldwide, and, in order to reach wider audience, they have to be translated to the native language of the respective country they target. The challenges the translator into Bulgarian faces are significant as most of the books are written in the nineteenth century and their style in some cases could be problematic. In addition, the terminological apparatus of the AMI is not established in Bulgarian and is just now coming into its own due to the increasing number of translated texts. Thus, in many of the cases the option of one-to-one translation is not acceptable and semantic translation has to be used instead. This paper looks into some of the issues that a translator has to overcome and provides examples of some source – target correspondences which have been approved by the AMI.