Chinese versions of foreign picture books have been for decades a staple segment of the children’s book market in Taiwan, but academic interest in translating picture books for children has only started to emerge in recent years. A picture book, unlike common literary works characterized by verbal language, is best understood in light of the interaction between the words and pictures in the book. A translator of a picture book is thus faced with a challenging and significant task, that is, the task of deciding whether the visual can be translated or whether the visual should be referred back to when translating. By looking at the translation theories developed by Liang Lin and other scholars in Taiwan, we suggest in the first part of the paper that the prevailing concept in children’s literature in Taiwan, i.e., the art of plain language, was underlined by the common assumptions toward childhood, and that word-and-picture interactions should be considered in the translation of a picture book. In the second part of the paper, we follow Maria Nikolajeva and Carole Scott’s categorization of word-and-picture interactions in picture books and examine Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen, and Outside Over There. In addition, we concentrate on the relationship between words and pictures and how that relationship influences translators’ strategies. Through a comparative analysis of both the English and Chinese versions of Sendak’s books, we indicate the noticeable changes in the word-and-picture interaction in the translated picture books. Those changes imply that the Chinese-language translations per se are different versions from their source texts, and that a translated picture book inevitably embodies a translator’s assumptions toward children as well as a translator’s understanding of the word-and-picture relationship in picture books.
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