Readability Of Children's Literature Translation From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Readability is the attraction of texts experienced by readers,and it highlights the important relationship between readers and texts.Due to the particularity of the target readers in children's literature,readability has become a vital criterion to measure the quality of books for children and their rendition into a foreign language.A large number of rhetorical devices have been employed by writers of children's literature to effectively improve the readability of these texts for minors.Thus,this study focuses on translation strategies of rhetorical devices to be adopted by translators in order to maintain the original meaning and enhance the readability of the translated texts.Based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,translation may be set as a dynamic process of adaptation,in which linguistic choices are continuously made for language-internal and language-external reasons.Since children's literature is different from adults' literature in language features,translators have to consciously and dynamically reproduce these features in language expressions readily understood by target language children at the stage of their cognitive development.In the paper a comparative analysis is made,by resorting both to the framework of linguistic adaptation initiated by Verschueren and to its expansion and application to translation studies,on the translation of rhetorical devices in the two Chinese versions of a literary work for children titled The Fellowship of the Ring from phonetic(including reduplicated words,onomatopoeia and rhyme),lexical(including puns,similes,personifications,hyperbole and repetitions)and syntactic(including parallelism and parodies)aspects,with a view to exploring how to enhance the readability of children's literature translation.In order to make the findings more objective,an integrated approach that combines corpus linguistics,case study,questionnaire and random interview is adopted in this research.The major findings are as follows:Firstly,at the phonetic level,the translated version with heavy use of reduplicated words and onomatopoeia is better adapted to children's cognitive context,so translators of children's literature can appropriately add such rhetorical devices to their rendition.Furthermore,collocation of reduplicated words and other rhetorical devices can greatly improve the readability of these renditions.In addition,two strategies employed for the translation of rhyme can effectively improve the readability of Chinese versions.(1)Translators can adapt themselves to the original linguistic structure by adopting a similar rhyming pattern in the target text.(2)Translators can adapt themselves to the socio-cultural context of Chinese young readers by adopting the rhyming pattern of classical Chinese poetry but with concise expressions to preserve the rhythmic beauty in source texts.Secondly,at the lexical level,punning effects of the original text should be preserved in the translation though not all the puns can be reproduced in the target language.Considering the cultural factors involved in puns,translators can add some footnotes or translate their implicit meanings directly so as to reproduce the cultural implication in the target language.Given the cognitive context of young readers,domestication is the principal strategy to reduce the cultural differences implicated by rhetorical devices such as similes,personifications and hyperbole.With regard to the rendition of repetitions,the strategy of addition generally makes the Chinese expressions more readable.Thirdly,at the syntactic level,the translation of parallelism requires translators to readjust the sentence structure flexibly to facilitate children's reading.The children's language that lacks in storage of “established forms” makes the parody of idioms better adaptive to children's communicative context than the parody of ancient poetry.In summary,to improve the readability of children's literature translation,translators should take into consideration children's cognitive abilities,knowledge base and aesthetic expectations.The use of vivid and interesting expressions,in addition to the melodious language style,can stimulate children's interest in reading.What's more,cultural differences between Chinese and English make the the strategy of “domestication first,foreignization second” better adapted to both the original linguistic structure and context of target readers,thus maximizing the readability of translated texts.