Traduire et retraduire Sans famille, ou comment faire aimer Hector Malot aux Pays-Bas

This article focuses on the (re)translations of Hector Malot’s novel Sans famille and their reception in the Netherlands. Adopting a sociological point of view, we will show that some classics of children’s literature have a double status in the literary field, either as literary or as educational works. The high amount of retranslations of these classics, published successively or simultaneously, can be explained by the hypothesis that some works, including Sans famille, gradually settle in various specialized niches of the literary field.