Purpose: We have studied in the present research the semantic relationship between publication date and literature templates in European books for children and adolescents translated into Persian in the first decade of 21^st century and have identified literature templates in the mentioned books which have been published during 9 years, i.e. from beginning of 2000 to end of 2008.
Methodology: Content analysis was used in this study by which it was tried to examine each of the stories in an accurate way and determine its literature template through systematic analysis of literature templates for the books. The population under study was chosen by ordered sampling. The necessary information for each book was written down in a checklist and the research hypothesis was tested using Chi-square test.
Findings: It was indicated that among the mentioned 318 translated story books, 59 of them (28%) were written by women; 170 of them (53.5%) were written by men; and 89 of them (28%) had no obvious author. Considering the four standard literature templates, it was shown that 89 of them (28%) were fable, 81 of them (25.4%) were fiction, 106 of them (33.4%) were fantasy, and 42 of them (13.2%) were folklore. English-speaking authors had the highest contribution with 105 books (31.9%). Furthermore, the results indicated that the hypothesis of “existence of a significant relationship between abundance of literature template and publication date” is rejected since p value was calculated to be 23.135 > 0.05 based upon Chi-square test. It was concluded that there is no significant relationship between literature templates and publication date for the translated books.
Originality/Value: This paper has identified the scope of literature templates for European books of children and adolescents translated into Persian, and it is a new approach which studies the status of books in this field regarding the typology of literature templates and investigates the semantic relationship between literature templates and publication date of these books.