On The Readability Of The Chinese Translation Of Children’s Picturebooks Based On Cognitive Development Theory

As a means of promoting early reading in early childhood education,children’s picturebooks have won popularity among many parents and child readers in recent years.Children’s picturebooks introduced from abroad are often presented to child readers in bilingual form,thus helps boosting their cognitive development as well as bilingual learning.Even though there are enormous number of bilingual picturebooks in the market,the quality of their translations varies significantly.Therefore,the problems confronting us now is: how can translators improve the readability of their translations and make reading easier for kids?Guided by cognitive development theory and readability theory,this thesis takes the series of Firefly Bilingual Picturebooks of World Classic Fairy Tales as corpus to explore the readability of children’s picturebooks from lexical,sentence,graphic and cultural levels based on the features of children’s language and cognitive development.At the lexical level,the author takes reduplicated words,onomatopoeic words,and modal particles as important factors to measure the readability of picturebooks.At the sentence level,the author conducts readability analysis in terms of simple and compound sentences.At the graphic level,the author studies respectively the effect of picture-text complementarity,picture-text symmetry,and picture-text contrast on the readability of picturebooks.At the cultural level,the author analyzes the effect of cultural convergence and cultural divergence on the readability of picturebooks.The thesis conducted an in-depth analysis of the 25 picturebooks in the series.The following are the main findings: First,when translating the series,translators have made extensive use of reduplicated words,onomatopoeic words,and modal particles to enhance the linguistic attractiveness of picturebooks,making translation more appealing to readers.Thus the readers may get richer reading emotions.Therefore,the readability of the translation has been improved as well.However,the author also find that inappropriate adaption of modal particles is still common in the translation.As a result,the smooth source language has turned to harsh and difficult target language,potentially reducing children’s interest in reading.Second,translators have frequently employed excellent rhetorical tactics to improve the readability of the translation.Simultaneously,from the perspective of the developmental law of children’s language,translators have made the target language simple and easy by flexibly altering the sentence structure and using the translation methods of addition and adaption.Some translators,however,have reduced the accuracy of the translation with excessive amplification and adaptations,causing unsatisfying reading experience.Third,in accordance with developmental cognitive law of language,picturebooks are often presented with vivid pictures to assist children in reading and augment the reading contents.For different picture-text relationships,the translator have used a combination of literal and liberal translation strategies,which can not only convey the information contained in the pictures and texts to child readers,but also give them some imagination space and enhance the interaction between readers and authors’ thoughts.Fourth,because of the unavoidable culture differences,the translator often employ domestication and foreignization tactics to eliminate comprehension barriers caused by cultural divergence,and improve the readability of the translation.In summary,the thesis examines the readability of picturebooks at four levels: lexical,sentences,graphic,and cultural level,using cognitive development theory and readability theory as guides,in the hope of providing some guidance for translators to produce more readable translations that are more in line with children’s cognitive development,as well as helping the study of picturebooks readability.