A Study On The Translation Of Swearwords In Children’s Literature From The Perspective Of Eco-translatology

Swearwords,as an essential part of a country’s linguistic and cultural system,provide a way to express the folk culture and national traditions of the people.Due to differences in religious,historical,cultural,and social backgrounds,different countries have distinct languages with similar meanings,as well as languages with national characteristics.However,in the case of children’s literature,which aims to create beauty,it is worthwhile to explore how translators can make trade-offs and translate Swearwords in a way that preserves the style of the original work while making it acceptable to readers of the translated language works.The Eco-translatology theory proposed by Pro.Hu Gengshen argues that translators need to make transitions in multiple dimensions such as linguistic dimension,cultural dimension,and communicative dimension during the translation process,and balance the elements in the ecological translation environment through“adaptive selection” and “selective adaptation”.For the Swearwords in children’s literature,translators need to make appropriate translations according to the unique ecological translation environment.This paper examines the translation of Swearwords in children’s literature from the perspective of Eco-translatology theory.It focuses on the cursing and insulting language that was found in the two translations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Deng Yongqiang and Ren Rongrong.The main analysis is on the “ThreeDimensional Transformation”,i.e.,the linguistic,cultural,and communicative dimensions of transformation.In the linguistic dimension,a limited corpus was built and Wordsmith software was used to conduct a quantitative analysis of nursery rhymes and poems text forms that are mixed with Swearwords,then studied the data in terms of Types/Tokens Ratio(TTR),Lexical Density,Mean Word Length,and syntax.In the cultural and communicative dimensions,a qualitative study was conducted by analyzing specific translation examples.Finally,the above comparative analysis was corroborated through a questionnaire and interviews with children from different particular ages.The study drew the following conclusions:(1)Charlie and the Chocolate Factory contains various forms of Swearwords which are influenced by the social situation,historical period,and development process of the source language country,despite being published as a children’s novel;(2)Both translators adopted different strategies and methods for translating Swearwords based on the different ecological translation environments they faced;(3)The analysis of the data shows that Deng’s translation is more direct,denser in vocabulary.He used longer and more complicated sentences.Thus,his version is more direct in the Swearwords translation.whereas Ren’s translation is more flexible and easy to read,and at the same time,it uses the vocabulary that can be approached education to translate these Swearwords.The readability questionnaire for samples of children at different stages shows that the acceptance and readability of Ren’s translation is higher than Deng’s.However,under the historical limitations and the social situation,Deng’s translation has its own tendency of publishing audience and mission of the times.Through the examination of Swearwords translation in children’s literature,this paper attempts to explore how translators can transform such language in a way that remains faithful to the original text while acceptable to the target readers.By doing so,the author hopes to enhance the studies of children’s literature translation in the future.