Abstract:

This article aims at proposing a hybrid model to evaluate language complexity of source and target texts written both in English and Portuguese so that one can analyse what extent language complexity has been transferred from a text to its translation. Here,hybrid modelpoints to paralleled approaches to lexical repetition, lexical diversity and lexical density, readability and word unusualness with the help of some Corpus Linguistics tools. The article also stands for developing adjustments to Paul Nation’s word family lists and Gunning’s GFI formula so that they can be applied to the Portuguese language. Aiming at checking the reliability of the model, the article also presents a case study based on contrastive investigations on The Secret Garden by Burnett and its translation into Portuguese O Jardim Secreto by Perota and Carvalho.

Keywords:
Linguistic transcoding; Language Complexity; Children’s Literature; Parallel Corpora