Language complexity of children's fiction: a contrastive study of the impact of the reader, writer and language
Abstrakt
The study focuses on structural complexity of original and translated fiction written for children and for adults. It explores the impact of the intended reader (children vs. adults) and the writer's distinct style on complexity, and investigates whether and how Czech translators adapt their translations to the audience.
The study analyses initial supplementive participial clauses in the works of three English authors who have written both for children and for adults, and whose works have been translated into Czech - R. Dahl, J.K.
Rowling and S. Rushdie.
It shows that writers adjust their writing to the audience even with respect to such local complexity features as the length, structure and function of sentence-initial participial clauses. The degree of complexity was found to be further reduced in the translations to Czech due to the synthetic character of the target language on the one hand, and to the strategies employed by the translators on the other.