Readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor

Abstract

Widely studied in fields like education, psychology, and linguistics, readability can be defined as (a) reader’s understanding of a reading text, (b) features of a text, or (c) the matching of a text to its reader. The existing research has been focused on the formulaic and multilevel discourse approaches, relatively neglecting others such as systemic functional linguistics oriented one. Moreover, contemporary reading materials pose a challenge for average children in many ways. This study examines readability and adaptation of children’s literary works from the perspective of ideational grammatical metaphor inspired by systemic functional linguistics. Through case studies of metaphorical transferences involving zero, one, two, and three ideational grammatical metaphors used in the parallel excerpts in the original version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its eight adapted ones published in China, it is concluded that addition, maintenance, revision, unpacking, and demetaphorization are five major strategies which are found to decrease, maintain, or increase readability of some parts in the adapted versions.