Pragmatic adaptation of modern children’s literature translated into Ukrainian

Abstract

This article aims at identifying the problem of pragmatic adaptation of modern children’s literature on the example of the children’s story «Judy Moody and Boring Summer» by Megan MacDonald translated into Ukrainian. Special attention is paid to the use of phraseological and axiological transformations in translation, such as allusive references to songs and phrasal units. The author of the original text uses allusions to various songs and phrases in order to provide new information to young readers and expand their outlook, taking examples from her own childhood, thus inspiring their self-confidence. The translator, on the other hand, adapts such realities to the Ukrainian-speaking reader. In particular, this article regards fragments when the translator had not found the equivalence to this or that English word group, therefore we proposed some of our own. Phrasal units are to adapted pragmatically in translation. Thus, they undergo various changes in translation in order to enhance the content effectively and fill in the literary text with new information. These changes are aimed at the best adaptation of phraseology to the content of the text and strengthening their functions in the text. The main task of the translator is to transfer stylistic devices or a set of figures which are conceptually important. In particular, the attention is focused on how the translator solves the problem when Ukrainian phraseology may not convey the expressiveness or importance of the situation in which the main character appears. In such cases, the translator resorts to descriptive translation, tracing, or contextual substitution to compensate for lexical lacunas. In addition, children’s literature is characterized by the transmission of English idioms with the help of Ukrainian fixed phrases of the colloquial register, which reinforce the meaning of a particular situation.