Expressive language in translation of books for children: a corpus-based study

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5209/clac.80532
Keywords: expressive language, translation solutions, multimodal discourse, children's literature

Abstract

The paper focuses on translation solutions used in translating expressive language from English into German, Croatian and Serbian. This qualitative analysis is corpus-based and it includes translations of a children’s book from the series Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney. These books are written for children aged 9 ‒12 and represent a kind of a hybrid multimodal form because they contain text accompanied by illustrations in the form of a comic with speech balloons, sound effects and similar. By expressive language we mean wordplay, onomatopoeic words and funny names, frequently employed in children’s literature. The source text is in English and the analysis will be based on solutions and techniques used in translations of this bestseller in Croatian, German and Serbian. The main aim of this research is to determine the functions of expressive language and the solutions translators used in order to achieve the same or similar effect in the target languages. The results of the study will give a better insight into the role of the translator in the whole process and the ways expressive language is translated.

Keywords: expressive language; translation solutions; multimodal discourse; children’s literature

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Diana Prodanović Stankić, University Novi Sad

Diana Prodanović Stankić is a Professor of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Novi Sad, Faculty of Philosophy, Department of English Studies. She was born in 1975 in Hamburg, Germany. Her research interests include humorous and multimodal discourse in education and translation with the focus on the interaction of language, culture and cognition.  She has authored three monographs and dozens of papers in the field of cognitive and cultural linguistics, pragmatics and translation studies. She teaches several courses related to translation and Cultural Linguistics at undergraduate and postgraduate level.

Helga Begonja, University of Zadar

Helga Begonja is an assistant professor at the University of Zadar. She graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy in Zadar (the University of Split), with a BA degree in the German and English Studies in 1999. During her academic studies, she studied at the Humboldt University in Berlin, as part of a DAAD grant programme. At Goethe Institute in Zagreb, she took a distant learning course from 2003 to 2006 and got the certificate “Teaching German as a Foreign Language in Theory and Practice“, which was awarded by Goethe Institute and the University of Kassel. She has taught at the Department of German Studies, the University of Zadar since 2007, first as a language instructor, and later on as a teaching assistant for German Linguistics. She finished her postgraduate studies in Linguistics at the Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb and defended her doctoral thesis in 2016. The title of her doctoral thesis is “Translation of Croatian culturemes on the example of Zadar's gastronomy”.

 

View citations

Article download

Crossmark

Metrics

Published
2024-11-14
How to Cite
Prodanović Stankić D. y Begonja H. (2024). Expressive language in translation of books for children: a corpus-based study. Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación, 100, 235-243. https://doi.org/10.5209/clac.80532
Issue
Vol. 100 (2024): Monográfico: Relaciones discursivas
Section
Articles

License

In order to support the global exchange of knowledge, the journal Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación is allowing unrestricted access to its content as from its publication in this electronic edition, and as such it is an open-access journal. The originals published in this journal are the property of the Complutense University of Madrid and any reproduction thereof in full or in part must cite the source. All content is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 use and distribution licence (CC BY 4.0). This circumstance must be expressly stated in these terms where necessary. You can view the summary and the complete legal text of the licence.