The Translation of Creative Lexis in Selected Children’s Literature in English into Malay: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

Creative lexis are new words coined and used exclusively by literary authors in their own work. Creative lexis, therefore, represents an author’s literary style and identity. In children’s literature, the formation of creative lexis is often phonologically motivated to entertain and enrich children’s reading experience. In addition, the discovery of creative lexis also trains child readers to employ effective cognitive strategies when dealing with new words found in academic and non-fiction texts. It is difficult, however, to re-create unique elements including creative lexis in translation. As such, there is a tendency to replace unique elements in source texts with typical words in the target texts. There are also tendencies for the opposite to happen, whereby unique elements from the source texts are retained in their original forms in the target texts. Both tendencies can be explained using the Laws of Translation hypothesis which states that unique elements are reduced or highlighted in translation, depending on not only cognitive but also various contextual factors. Based on reviews of previous studies, there is a need to study creative lexis and its translation into Malay because there is very limited information, especially empirical data, on Malay translations of children’s books despite translation playing a crucial role in the Malaysian children’s books industry. This study is, therefore, carried out to fulfil the following three objectives: (1) to identify the forms and types of creative lexis in selected English children’s literature, (2) to analyse the tendencies in the translation of these creative lexis, and (3) to explain the tendencies based on the patterns found through this study. The study is carried out based on a corpus-based research model for the translation of creative lexis by Kenny (2001). The parallel corpus used in this study consists of three children’s literature series in English and their translations into Malay. A corpus method is used as it allows for a large amount of data to be managed systematically. The study found five types of creative lexis, and that there are different translation tendencies for the three texts in the corpus of the study which could be represented in the form of a cline. The tendencies are influenced by several factors which are the types and functions of creative lexis in the texts, the genre of the texts as well as the age group of the target readers. Finally, the study suggests a set of procedures for translating creative lexis which could be applied by translators especially in the context of translation into Malay.