A corpus-based study of embellishment in translations of the Newbery Medal Awards
Abstract
Embellishment is a stylistic feature of translated children’s literature. In recent years, children’s reading choices and experiences have been truly thought highly of and, today, the idea that lexical enrichment is good for children ––either for their writing or reading experience–– is prevailing among children’s literature translators and book editors. With this in mind, a small corpus composed of translations of the Newbery Medal Awards was built to figure out whether the phenomenon of embellishment exists in English-Chinese translations of children’s literature and, if so, what are the motivations for it. The corpus includes six books selected on four criteria. The study suggests that embellishment is a typical feature of selected translations of the Newbery Awards and that it can be related to both book editing and the translator’s own choices.
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