COGNITIVE MECHANISMS OF LINGUISTIC SIMPLIFICATION IN THE TRANSLATION OF CHILDREN'S LITERATURE: A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF ENGLISH AND UZBEK

This article investigates the cognitive mechanisms that underlie linguistic simplification in the translation of children's literature, focusing on the English-Uzbek language pair. While previous scholarship has catalogued the linguistic outcomes of simplification—shorter sentences, more frequent vocabulary, reduced subordination—this study shifts attention to the underlying cognitive processes that motivate translators to select these outcomes. Drawing on models of working memory, schema theory, and dual-process accounts of reading comprehension, the article proposes a taxonomy of four cognitive mechanisms operative in simplification: memory-load reduction, schema activation, inferential offloading, and processing-fluency optimization. Each mechanism is illustrated with comparative examples from English children's texts and their Uzbek translations. The analysis suggests that simplification is best understood not as a single unified strategy but as a cluster of related cognitive accommodations, each targeting a distinct bottleneck in the child reader's comprehension process. The study concludes with implications for translator training and for the broader theoretical modeling of translation as a cognitively motivated act of audience design.