I first got interested in abridged translations when I realized that Sir Thomas Malory's "Le Morte D'Arthur" has been translated into Finnish only once and that this translation is an abridged translation aimed for teenagers. I had not paid any attention to this kind of translation before and I thought it would be interesting to find out how usual this method of translating was, what kind of books are translated in this manner, exactly how is the abridgement done, and what kind of problems arise during the translation process.
Fennica, the national bibliography, provided an excellent source for a limited statistical study on the generality of this phenomenon. The study has its shortcomings, but it gives some idea of the general acceptability of this kind of translations.
Finding theory about abridged translation was not very easy. It seems that mostly the theory concerns children's literature, even though this method is used also for non-fiction and fiction which is written and translated for adults. The theory I managed to find was mainly by two persons, Klingberg and Oittinen, who have different views on the matter. I started with Klingberg's theories, because, of these two, he studied the matter first. Then I studied the criticism Oittinen has directed towards Klingberg's views.
To find out how the actual abridgement of a translation is done, I chose two books and their translations, which I studied in detail. One book was, naturally, "Le Morte D'Arthur" as it had awakened my interest in the first place. It is the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. It was originally written on 1485, so it differs considerably from the other book I studied. That was Peter Straub's "Ghost Story", which is just what its name suggests, a ghost story. It is one of my favourite books and it has been translated on the same year as Malory's book, 1979. The fact that both have been translated on the same year made the comparison between them interesting because of the general attitudes at that time.
Before moving on, I want to define the term "abridged translation" in the sense that it is used in this study. With abridged translation I mean translation from which a significant amount of the content of the original text has been excluded. Significant amount means several pages or chapters or small deletions of paragraphs and sentences totalling in several pages, because there are always differences between the contents of the original and the translation. I also use term "shortened translation" in the same meaning as "abridged translation".