LEXICAL AND SYNTACTIC SIMPLIFICATION IN THE TRANSLATION OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: A COGNITIVE-COMMUNICATIVE ANALYSIS OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK TEXTS

Translating children's literature presents a distinctive set of challenges that differ markedly from those encountered in translating texts intended for adult readers. Because child readers possess developing linguistic competence, limited world knowledge, and constrained working memory capacity, translators of children's books routinely engage in processes of lexical and syntactic simplification. This article examines these simplification strategies through a cognitive-communicative framework, drawing on comparative examples from English source texts and their Uzbek translations. The analysis demonstrates that simplification is not a reductive or deficient translation strategy but a purposeful, reader-oriented adaptation that preserves communicative intent while accommodating the cognitive profile of the target audience. The article discusses lexical substitution, semantic narrowing, syntactic restructuring, clause reduction, and the management of cohesion, illustrating each with authentic examples from English children's literature rendered into Uzbek. It concludes that successful simplification in this genre requires translators to balance fidelity to the source text with sensitivity to the developmental, cultural, and linguistic realities of the target child reader.