Phraseology in Children’s Literature: A Contrastive Analysis

Phraseological units notoriously pose challenges for both translators and language learners. However, the presence and nature of phraseological units in lower language proficiency levels have received very little attention. Could Children’s Literature contribute to identifying a core phraseological inventory? Both authors and translators of children’s books base their linguistic choices, and their phraseological choices specifically, on the assumptions they have of the still limited linguistic, phraseological, and cultural knowledge of their young receivers. This dissertation investigates Dutch and Italian phraseology in Children’s Literature. In the first part, theoretical aspects concerning Phraseology, (Contrastive) Linguistics, Translation Studies and Children’s Literature are addressed, as well as methodological issues regarding the empirical studies presented in the second part of this work. The detailed contrastive, bidirectional analysis of phraseological units and their translatants (original Dutch ↔ translated Italian), including the mapping of similarities and differences between phraseological inventories, and the examination of the translational equivalence between phraseological units and their translatants, have offered numerous intra- and interlinguistic insights.