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Language and Cultural Influence of Other Slavic Languages on Croatian through Children’s Literature Translations

The Croatian language, a South Slavic language, is spoken by approximately seven million people in the Republic of Croatia and abroad. For historical reasons, the Croatian language was under the influence of various languages. More over, different parts of Croatian speaking area were influenced by various languages: German and Hungarian influenced Croatian in the areas that were a part of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy ; the Turkish language influenced Croatian in the continental part of the country and Italian influenced Croatian in the areas along the Adriatic Sea coast. The influences are most noticeable in the Croatian vocabulary, especially in the Croatian dialects. The influence of other Slavic languages, apart from the Serbian language, is less noticable and the speakers are rearly aware of the fact that a particular word is a borowing from another Slavic languge (i.e. Slovak or Czech). The two groups of borowings, Slavic and non-Slavic, have different origin, but also a different status in the standard language. Non-Slavic borowings are mostly the result of language contact (i.e. bilingual environment and bilingual speakers), while a considerable number of the Slavic borowings are the result of language planing (for example, the development of terminology by Bogoslav Šulek). Also, due to the language purism, most non- Slavic borowings are considerd to be non- standard lexems, while many Slavic borowings are a part of the standard Croatian language. This paper examines the role of Children literature in language contact, i.e. language borowings. Considering the fact that specific cultural and linguistic elements of a given nation are carried over through the process of translation, it is interesting to study Croatian translation of Chidren Literature writen in other Slavic languages in order to investigate the cultural and linguistic transition from a source langage to the target language – Croatian. Dealing with linguisticaly and culturaly bound lexemes is an issue in every translation, but even more in children literature due to the limited linguistical and extra-linguistical knowledge of the readers. This paper deals with Croatian translations of Slavic children literature from the 20th century. The first aim is to create a corpus of Croatian translations of Slavic children literature based on the most frequently translated books. Second aim is to investigate strategies in translation of culturaly bound vocabulary, especialy toponyms and antroponyms. This will be achieved by the means of computer analysis of the afore mentioned corpus. The computer analysis will determine the most frequent tokens, lexical density and lexical diversity ; whilst the content analysis will be used to determine which specific cultural elements were transferred in a translated piece of literature and how. The expected results are adaptations of names on phonological and orthographic levels, as well as the visibility of specific cultural elements in toponymy, hydronymy and oronymy, but also the usage of Croatian cultural equivalents.

Croatian language; children's literature; translations; lexis

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