“Language is the most important thing”. Christine Nöstlinger’s Children’s and Youth books in the mirror of their Italian and English translation

The paper analyses potential problems of translation from Austrian German into Italian and English in the texts of Christine Nöstlinger, an award-winning Austrian children’s and youth book writer translated into more than 30 languages. In particular, I would like to examine how Austrian German is translated into Italian and English and whether those specific elements of the original language and culture, which represent the originality of Nöstlinger’s works and at the same time act as important carriers of cultural identity, are preserved in the translation process, or whether the texts lose their local colour in translation.