Re: Linguistics journals LONGISH

[Logical Language Group <lojbab@ACCESS.DIGEX.NET>]

>One fluent parent should be enough, but yes, some children's books would
>be a very good project.  Anybody want to tackle Dr. Seuss? :)  It might be
>interesting to see if we could negotiate some limited rights to some of
>the more popular children's works for the purpose of translation.

Dr Seuss is precisely the kind of book that we can run into trouble
translating becuase it is copyrighted, and (I understand that) the author's
estate is pretty aggressively marketing it.

>There's
>certainly no market for the translations to justify a normal translator's
>contract, but certainly a few out-of-copyright works wouldn't be hard.

Grimm's and Andersen's fairy tales work well, but if you have ever seen the
texts, they are not "children's literature" in the same sense as is
Dr. Seuss.  Indeed, "See Spot run" is probably a loargely American English
folly.  Most other languages with more phonemic writing systems have
very few ultra-simple texts of the Seuss variety, but rather advance to
the next tier of difficulty rather early in the learning-to-read process.
Thus I have Russian ckazki (fairy tales) that are primarily read TO young
pre-readers.  But the first grade in Russian advances the kids from reading
primers to around what I would call 3rd to 4th grade English texts. And
they start stidying children's LITERATURE (the Russian equivalent of Grimm and
Andersen) in 2nd grade.

The priumary sign of kids stories in other languages seems not to be
simplicity of language, but rather brevity, and perhaps the use of anthro-
pomorphic animals as characters.  The language is often quite difficult.
(See the Lojban tranbslations of Aesop's fables for an example).

lojbab