Rewriting Romeo and Juliet for a young audience. A corpus-assisted case study of adaptation techniques


Abstract


Abstract – Children’s literature has been explored from different perspectives. General agreement seems to exist on the fact that writing for children involves adjusting contents and language (vocabulary and syntax) to the target audience, but no systematic and detailed description of the linguistic strategies used or required to adapt texts to young audiences is available. The current chapter analyses two narrative versions of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet written in contemporary English by the same author for two young audiences of different ages, and investigates this author’s adaptation techniques through corpus-assisted methods. The analyses show that the author has resorted to a clear set of adaptation techniques, with some differences in the two texts. These linguistic and cultural context adaptation strategies are in perfect keeping with the affective needs and cognitive abilities of each age group as described in theoretical and empirical studies on children’s literature and developmental psychology.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v27p43

Keywords: children’s literature; corpus linguistics; stylistic analysis; Romeo and Juliet; adaptation techniques

References


Anthony L. 2013, Developing AntConc for a new generation of corpus linguists, Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL 2013), July 22-26, 2013, Lancaster University, UK, pp. 14-16. http://www.laurenceanthony.net/research/20130722_26_cl_2013/cl_2013_paper_final.pdf (14.01.2018).

Appleyard J.A. 1991, Becoming a Reader: The experience of fiction from childhood to adulthood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Archer D., Culpeper J. and Rayson R. 2009, Love - ‘A familiar of a devil’? An exploration of key domains in Shakespeare’s comedies and tragedies, in D. Archer (ed.), What’s in a word-list? Investigating word frequency and keyword extraction, Digital research in the Arts and Humanities, Ashgate, Farnham, pp. 136-157.

Barone D.M. 2011, Children’s literature in the classroom. Engaging lifelong readers, The Guilford Press, New York/London.

Beckett S.L. 2009, Crossover Fiction. Global and historical perspectives, Routledge, New York/London.

Bell A. 1986, Translator’s notebook: delicate matters, in “Signal” 49, pp. 17-26.

Cain K. and Oakhill J.V. 1996, The nature of the relationship between comprehension skill and the ability to tell a story, in “British Journal of Developmental Psychology” 14, pp. 187-201.

Chapman J. 1987, Reading: from 5-11 years, Open University Press, Milton Keynes.

Culpeper J. 2002, Computers, language and characterisation: An Analysis of six characters in Romeo and Juliet, in Melander-Marttala U., Ostman C. and Kyto M. (eds.), Conversation in Life and in Literature: Papers from the ASLA Symposium. Association Suedoise de Linguistique Appliquee (ASLA), 15, Universitetstryckeriet: Uppsala, pp. 11-30.

Fischer-Starcke B. 2009, Keywords and frequent phrases of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. A corpus-stylistic analysis, in “International Journal of Corpus Linguistics” 14 [4], pp. 492-523.

Fischer-Starcke B. 2010, Corpus Linguistics in Literary Analysis. Jane Austen and her contemporaries, Continuum, London/New York.

Gamble N. and Yates S. 2002, Exploring children’s literature. Teaching the language and reading of fiction, Paul Chapman Publishing, London.

Garside R. and Smith N. 1997, A hybrid grammatical tagger: CLAWS4”, in Garside R., Leech G. and McEnery A.M. (eds.), Corpus Annotation: Linguistic Information from Computer Text Corpora, Longman, London, pp. 102-121.

Gerbig A. 2010, Keywords and key phrases in a corpus of travel writing: from Early Modern English literature to contemporary ‘blooks’, in Bondi M. and Scott M. (eds.), Keyness in Texts, John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, pp. 147-168.

Halliday M.A.K. 2004, An Introduction to Functional Grammar, Hodder Arnold, London.

Hunt P. (ed.) 2005, Understanding children’s literature, Routledge, London/New York.

James K. 2009, Death, Gender and Sexuality in Contemporary Adolescent Literature, Routledge, New York/London.

Kilgarriff A., Bušta J., Jakubíček M., Kovář V., Michelfeit J., Rychlý P. and Suchomel V. 2014, The Sketch Engine: ten years on, in “Lexicography” 1, pp. 7-36.

Klingberg G. 1986, Childrens’ fiction in the hand of translators, CWK Gleerup, Malmo.

Lathey G. 2015. Translating Children’s literature, Routledge, New York/London.

Long D.L., Oppy B.J. and Seely M.R. 1997, Individual differences in reader’s sentence- and text-level representations, in “Journal of Memory and Language” 36, 129-145.

Lundin A. 2004, Constructing the canon of children’s literature. Beyond library walls and ivory towers, Routledge, New York/London.

Mahlberg M. 2010, Corpus Linguistics and the Study of Nineteenth-Century Fiction, in “Journal of Victorian Culture” 15 [2], pp. 292-298.

Mahlberg M. and Smith C. 2010, Corpus Approaches to Prose Fiction: Civility and Body Language in Pride and Prejudice, in Busse B. and McIntyre D. (eds.), Language and Style, Palgrave, Basingstoke, pp. 449-467.

Murphy S. 2007, Now I am alone: A corpus stylistic approach to Shakespearian soliloquies, in Gabrielatos C., Slessor R. and Unger J.W. (eds.), Papers from the Lancaster University Postgraduate Conference in Linguistics & Language Teaching, Vol. 1, http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/events/laelpgconference/papers/v01/Volume01.pdf#page=68 (14.01.2018).

Nation K. and Snowling M. J. 1998, Semantic processing and the development of word recognition skills: Evidence from children with reading comprehension difficulties, in “Journal of Memory and Language” 39, pp. 85-101.

Oittinen R. 2000, Translating for Children, Garland Publishing, New York/London.

Rayson P. 2009, Wmatrix: a web-based corpus processing environment, Computing Department, Lancaster University. http://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/wmatrix/ (14.01.2018).

Rayson P., Archer D., Piao S.L. and McEnery T. 2004, The UCREL semantic analysis system, in Proceedings of the workshop on Beyond Named Entity Recognition Semantic labelling for NLP tasks in association with 4th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2004), 25th May 2004, Lisbon, Portugal, pp. 7-12. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228881331_The_UCREL_semantic_analysis_system (14.01.2018).

Reid J. and Donaldson H. 1977, Reading: Problems and Practices, Ward Lock, London.

Scott M. and Tribble C. 2006, Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education, John Benjamins, Philadelphia.

Shavit Z. 1986, Poetics of children’s literature, The University of Georgia Press, Athens and London.

Sellinger Trites R. 2000, Disturbing the Universe: Power and Repression in Adolescent Literature, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Stubbs M. 2005, Conrad in the computer: examples of quantitative stylistic methods, in “Language and Literature” 14 [1], pp. 5-24.

van Coillie J. and Verschueren W. (eds.) 2006, Children’s Literature in Translation: Challenges and strategies, St. Jerome Publishing, Manchester.

Vandergrift K.E. 1990, Children’s literature. Theory, research and teaching, Libraries unlimited, Englewood, Colorado.

Yuill N. and Joscelyne T. 1988, Effects of organizational cures and strategies on good and poor comprehenders’ story understanding, in “Journal of Educational Psychology” 80 [2], pp. 152-158.


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.