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Gage Lopez

Professor Johnson

Writing 2

5/30/18

Genre Translation Analysis

Writing content is highly dependent on the genre that it is being written for. This genre

translation, is a personal letter, titled “Dear Boss,” which was sent to the Central News Agency

of London by the Victorian Age serial killer Jack the Ripper. This has been translated into a

children's book named “The Fox and the Farmer.” The translation has been done to mimic the

same humorous informality that was used to address the awfully gruesome murders of Jack’s

victims.

When crafting a genre translation, many careful decisions must be made. A children’s

book, although it may not look so, has a multitude of conventions and practices that make it

appeal to children. Language is extremely important when it comes to children's books. . Not

only the language you use, but the tone, complexity, and length of words and phrases can turn a

romance novel into a horror story. In the process of creating a children’s book, I discovered that

often the length and complexity of sentences is rather short.The audiences mental capabilities

limits the way the story is able to be told from the get-go, making it small, digestible, and

concise. Additionally, the type of characters and the illustrations found in children's books are

very specific and colorful. I made sure to pick characters that the intended audience can identify
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easily, but also have qualities of the actual players in this event,(fox, hens, farmer, etc…) and

included the cartoon-like brightly colored illustrations seen in most children's books today.

Although the inclusion of illustrations was not necessary, Scott McCloud's “Writing With

Pictures,” changed my mind completely. He describes how with only illustrations, you can have

a greater control over what exactly your work functions as, with the ability to utilize choices of “

moment, frame, image, word, and flow” [McCloud 3]. With pictures, a superior level of clarity

can be achieved which therefore makes for less of a “gap” in the primary audience’s

understanding.

Character and illustration were two of the main strategies employed in the making of this

book I chose to do this method was what made such a translation possible. Dealing with the stark

dichotomy in content while simultaneously maintaining the purpose proved to be an extremely

difficult task. Bysing these characters, I was able to convey a similar message through a large use

of metaphor. One such example of this was avoiding the topic of death by instead using the

situation of a fox in the hen house. Children understand that this is unwanted/unpermitted

behavior; however, the main point is that Jack the fox causes disorder in the “hen house” and

represents Jack the Ripper being the fox in the “whore house.” Through this assignment I learned

that children’s books most often end happily. Because of the age group of the new audience,

negative, dark, and stress-inducing thoughts are mostly avoided. This posed a problem as I found

it near impossible to convey such dark events in only words. Being so concerned with the main

point of the letter being evident in the children's book, I used pictures and a relatable character

set to deliver the message instead.

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While also being characters that they can relate closely to, this type of character relationship

immediately creates a relationship in which one player is the authority and one the subordinate.

Personally, I found this sort of character relationship necessary in order to imitate the exigence of

Jack the Ripper’s personal letter. Carroll’s Backpacks piece made clear that a writer must

“identify the purpose of the rhetoric” in “Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis” by specifically

stating that “ Understanding the exigence is important because it helps you begin to discover the

purpose of the rhetoric. It helps you understand what the discourse is trying to accomplish.”

(Carroll 49). Once this strategy became clear, the need to carry over the same rhetorical purpose

over in my translation became obvious.

Although a translation into a less troublesome genre would have been easier to do well, I

felt that by doing a children's book I could highlight the humorous informality I spoke of earlier.

Because Jack the Ripper treated his horrific crimes so informally, I felt that a story of a game

between a fox and a farmer only further accentuated this irony and reveals the utter psychopathy

and twisted intellect the killer had by treating such an ordeal as “child's play.” This message is

one that I felt important to convey to the intended audience because it was such an important

message of the killer to portray to the police.

In this translation of a serial killer’s personal letter into a child’s book the skills of

rhetoric and genre identification/understanding have been effectively demonstrated. Certain

parallels have been identified and used in order to maintain the purpose of the original piece in

compliance with the practices of the new genre. These parallels are especially important as they

truly tie together the irony of the situation as a whole. This assignment clearly demonstrates the
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true power of how exactly conventions define genres, as well as my understanding of discourse

communities/genres as a whole​.

Works Cited

“ Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis.” ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing​,Carroll Backpack,

vol. 1, Charles Lowe, 2010, pp. 45–58.

McCloud, Scott.“Writing With Pictures.” ​Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing​, vol. 1, Charles

Lowe, 2010, pp. 8–37.