FEATURES OF HUMOUR IN TRANSLATIONS OF JEREMY STRONG'S WORKS

Abstract

The article deals with the peculiarities of creating humour in Ukrainian translations of Jeremy Strong's works My brother's famous buttocks, My Brother's Famous Bottom Gets Pinched та There's a Viking in My Bed. 

It is found that humour in a literary text for children has its own peculiarities of expression: situational or linguistic, accessible to a certain age category, taking into account the psychological characteristics of the child's development.

Among the features of the depiction of humour in fiction works for children, scholars point out that humour plays a special role. In particular, the comic contributes to education and spiritual enrichment, performing a specific protective function for the child's psyche against negative external influences.

The study found that despite the existence of such a large body of Jeremy Strong's fiction for children, his popularity among Ukrainian readers, as there are many of his works translated into Ukrainian, there is still little research from a literary or linguistic point of view. Numerous interviews have revealed that Jeremy Strong began writing humorous works for primary school children in order to attract children to reading. The writer was convinced that those who read as children would continue to read as adults. He chose humour as his weapon of choice because he believed that humour was the most effective means of influencing and shaping children's minds, and it also helped them to understand and perceive the complexities of adult life.

The choice of means of creating humour by the writer depends on the plot of the work, in some of them situational humour prevails with additional means of irony, repetition, puns, in others the emphasis is on the national peculiarities of English humour, such as black humour, self-irony, language play, etc.