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Jersey Richardson

Jesse Wesso

WRIT 2

23 January 2023

Kids Can Read This Too

When this project asked me to translate an academic article of my choosing into another

genre, I knew it was going to be difficult. And let me tell you, it was. But it was also challenging

in the sense that it was also fun. I had never been assigned a project like this but I am pleasantly

surprised to say that it was just the breath of fresh air I needed in terms of school assignments.

Deciding to translate my academic article, “Social media? It’s serious! Understanding the dark

side of social media” by Christian Baccarella, into a children's book turned out to be something I

am pretty proud of.

As the genre that I am translating my academic article into is a children’s book, I feel that

it is pretty obvious that the new intended audience is children. But the reason that I chose this

specific genre is that in this day and age, kids are introduced to social media at a very early point

in their life. I feel that using a children’s book to teach them the realities of the internet and social

media is the most effective way because from personal experience the books my parents read to

me or that I read myself had a lasting effect on me. Although, this new intended audience is very

different from the original audience that my academic article was intended for. The author of this

article initially wrote it for researchers and for people who are already on social media. This is

because the author’s purpose was to bring light to the fact that the public does not pay attention
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to the damaging consequences of social media. But I decided I wanted to use the information

from this article and make an influential use out of it for the youth. While the intended audiences

may not be the same, our purposes with this source of information are sort of similar.

As I mentioned before, I chose a children's book as the genre I am translating my article

into because the topic of my article can be very impactful for the younger generation. But I

would be lying if I did not admit that I also thought it would be an interesting and challenging

way to translate this type of information. This genre, children's books, will effectively

communicate with my intended audience because my purpose is to educate the children of this

upcoming generation about the potential dangers of social media. Parents use books to teach

their children, so using this teaching device to give them very important information is the most

effective way. I still remember specific books that were read to me as a child and I think that a

book on this topic has the potential to do the same.

I integrated information from my academic article into my new genre by taking the most

important information, like what the building blocks/framework of social media are, how they

are good for our society, and how they are bad for our world, then putting them into short and

simple sentences like a kids book would have. This proved to be difficult because this meant a

change in language as well. While my academic article was composed of scholarly words, a

children’s book calls for more simple and more understandable words. So on top of picking and

choosing which information was most relevant, I needed to break down those ideas in a way that

would fit the criteria of my chosen genre. My illustrations on the pages also help give a better

understanding of what the idea is. The only information that I did not transfer from the article to

the translation is the discussion of how there should be more research into the dark side of social
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media because I believe that the key information and topic was the explanation of the dark side

and how it affects us/society.

The main challenge I had translating my article into this genre was condensing important

facts and ideas into one or two-line sentences. Another problem was deciding what information

to include and not include while simultaneously keeping the integrity of the original article. Eva

Reyman had a similar problem in her essay “A Feminist Take on a Three Course Meal”. She

mentions “... key aspects of genre translation are deciding what to maintain from the original

work…” (Reyman 2022, 87). There were times I had to join some sentences or ideas into one

page because they were talking about the same thing or they were able to bounce off each other

well. The last thing that gave me some difficulties was drawing an illustration for the page and/or

ideas. I was trying to make my drawings as animated and as colorful as I could to resemble a

children’s book.

In all, this writing project presented me with tasks that I have never had to do before so it

forced me to think more intricately about my process. Translating an academic article into a

children’s book came with its challenges but it made me take a closer look at the skills and

techniques used in one form of writing and express them in a different way. If it were not for this

project, I otherwise would not have considered such things.

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Works Cited

Dirk, Kerry. “Navigating Genres.” In Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, edited by Charles

Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky, 249-262. 2010.

Reyman, Eva. “A Feminist Take on a Three Course Meal.” In Starting Lines: An Anthology of

Student Writing, 81-89. 2022.