Is translated children’s book easy to read?

Abstract

This paper investigates the applicability of readability formulas for researches on reading, but mainly on Translation Studies. Based on this purpose, we measured the readability of two best-sellers of children's literature translated from German and English into Portuguese using the formulas Flesch Ease Reading Readability and Flesch-Kincaid. The research method was: scanning 250 words from each book, separating syllables, counting words and sentences, rewriting the formulas in the programm Microsoft Excel, and inserting the data. The results showed that although the objects of study are best-sellers, they have a low readability degree and require a higher education degree for the Brazilian public. We concluded that the formulas should be used as a global analysis on the readability of translated texts and they can be combined with various types of textual analysis. Moreover, the formulas were created based on English, and they need an adaptation to Brazilian Portuguese, because the difference between both language, mainly related to.