A Corpus-based Study On The Normalization Of Chinese Translated Young Children's Literature For The 3-6-year-old

Young children's literature is specifically created for the children from 3 to 6 years old with the most prominent characteristics of children's literature.This research makes an in-depth investigation on the normalization phenomenon in Chinese translated young children's literature by a small-size comparable corpus. It compares the statistics of two sub-corpora from both lexical, syntactic and discourse levels to explore the manifestations of normalization and deviation. It also explains the main causes and possible effects of normalization and deviation on children's literature.The study proves the coexistence of normalization and deviation on all levels. The normalization tendency is the most remarkable on lexical level, including the similarity in general POS distribution patterns between translated and non-translated texts, underuse of noun and overuse of verb, more frequent use of typical modal particle, greater occurrences of high-frequency words in CTYCL and high overlapping rate of high-frequency words with COYCL. The normalization tendency is less significant on syntactic and discourse levels. The evidences are the overuse of typical "?" passive and higher occurrence of negative prosody in passive structure, greater frequencies of high-frequency connectives and normalized personal anaphora structure in translated literature.The deviation tendency is the most observable on syntactic and discourse levels. And the evidences are longer mean length of sentence segment and the overuse of long passive structure as well as more frequent use of overt cohesive devices, including connectives and personal pronouns in translated literature. The deviation is less prominent on lexical level, which is mainly demonstrated by larger proportions of functional words in translated literature, lower frequency of modal particle and higher lexical richness than non-translated literature.Both normalization and deviation have advantages and disadvantages. Proper normalization conforms to the norm of target language and thus largely decreases the reading difficulty caused by language differences and increases the acceptability of literature for young readers of imperfect literacy but over-normalization decreases the degrees of vividness and colloquialism. Proper deviation could be an attraction for young readers and is helpful for them to understand the covert logical relations while inappropriate deviation leads to redundancy and grammatical disorder.The research finds that the normalization is mainly attributed to "target-language-oriented" and "reader-oriented" subjectivity of translators while the deviation can be caused by "the interference of English source language" and "reader-oriented" subjectivity. Translators should measure the advantages and disadvantages of the two tendencies and make the best of subjectivity on the basis of good awareness of social-cultural background and reader's expectations to realize the entertaining and educating functions of children's literature.This research aims at investigating the normalization in translated Chinese young children's literature based on the self-built corpus. It's helpful to have a better understanding of current translation situation in young children's literature and to broaden the vision and methodology in the studies of children's literature translation. Meanwhile, it can shed light on the children's literature translation practice and criticism.