Creativity and Style in Children’s Literature Translation: Human, Neural Machine, and Artificial Intelligence Modalities of Re-Creation

Authors : Özge Aksoy

Pages : 355-386

Doi:10.71218/asobid.1806746

View : 45 | Download : 67

Publication Date : 2025-12-30

Article Type : Research Paper

Abstract :Authors of children’s literature push the boundaries of imagination, thus creating distinctive narrative styles. Such imaginative and stylistically rich works inevitably raise questions about how creativity travels across languages and translation modalities. This study questions the act of recreation not only through human translators but also through contemporary translation technologies. Rather than assuming particular outcomes, it critically examines to what extent neural machine translation renders stylistics in children’s literature and whether large language models occupy an intermediary position, potentially operating both as a mediating system and as a prompt generated creative agent. The recreative act idea of the study derives from Oittinen’s dialogic approach to translating for children and combines this with Skopos theory, which views translation as a purposeful act through a functional perspective (Oittinen, 2000; Vermeer, 1989). Based on this child-centred nature of translation, it explores how literary translators, neural machine translation, and artificial intelligence transfer the distinctive style of Roald Dahl into Turkish. The corpus consists of The Giraffe and The Pelly and Me (1985) alongside its human, machine, and AI-assisted translations. The parallel corpus includes rhyme, rhythm and song-like structures, neologisms, onomatopoeic items, and wordplays as the most striking stylistic features of the text. Focusing on stylistic representation, creative re-creation, child-centredness, and functional adequacy, the comparative qualitative analysis investigates how each modality recreates Dahl’s authorial voice and oral narrative quality. Findings showed distinct differences among the three translation modalities in re-creating Dahl’s style. The human translation achieves the highest creative and functional success, preserving rhyme, rhythm, and humour in line with the child-centred aim. The NMT output remained literal and rhythmically mechanical, while the AI translation, though occasionally inventive, lacked consistency. Overall, the human translator acted as a co-creator, whereas machine systems still fell short of retaining imaginative and dialogic style.
Keywords : Çocuk Edebiyatı Çevirisi, Çevirmen Yaratıcılığı, Nöral Makine Çevirisi, Yapay Zekâ Destekli Çeviri, Üslup Analizi

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