Roczniki Humanistyczne vol. 74, no. 8 (2026)

CORPUS LINGUISTICS AND TRANSLATION STUDIES

Childhood: Bilingual Terminology and Translation

Childhood, mentioned in the Bible since ancient times, is also at the center of interest of international bodies. We must remember the establishment in 1954 by the United Nations Organization of the International Children’s Day to promote respect for children and their rights, celebrated on November 20 (the day of the adoption of the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989). The Catholic Church shows concern for children. For example, Pope John Paul II published his Letter to Children in the Year of the Family (1994), and Pope Francis is to canonize the young Carlo Acutis in April 2025. When we talk about the child spirit – which is a state of mind – in everyday life and about spiritual childhood in Christianity, we do not refer to being infantile.

The child in the broad sense is a young person (during the prenatal period, infancy, childhood, adolescence) who depends on parents and enters into a relationship with the family and the living environment. Texts on childhood are divided into texts about children (medicine, psychology, law and others) and texts for children (books and films).

The aim of volume 74 of Roczniki Humanistyczne, fascicle 8 “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies” is to draw attention to linguistic expressions related to various thematic areas related to childhood (prenatal stage, infancy, early childhood, adolescence) and to create a space for exchange for linguists, terminologists and translation specialists in order to present different theoretical and methodological approaches to their research. Submissions  will fit into one of the axes (given for information purposes only) that interpenetrate each other relative to childhood:

1. Contrastive linguistics

Linguistic analyses of data from parallel bilingual corpora from the field of childhood could enable the collection of examples to be used in writing bilingual dictionaries:
- morphological structures of the lexicon, e.g. dziecko and dziecięctwo in Polish and their French equivalents;
- complex units (endocentric or exocentric) defining the child’s environment;
- nomino-verbal / verbo-nominal collocations with a noun defining a child and its environment;
- metaphors and idiomatic expressions (their creation and understanding by children, therapeutic metaphors for children);
- creation of children’s lexicon (word formation, modification of word forms, homophones);
- proverbs about children and childhood.

1. Bilingual terminology and specialized languages

Referring to the methods of corpus linguistics of specialized texts (medicine, law, etc.) in the field of childhood, this research may concern the following problems:

- multidimensional relations between the terms and their anchoring in specialized discourses (biomedical, legal, etc.);
- essential relations: ontic/ontological structures and meaning of words/terms, superordinate relations (hyperonyms/hyponyms and holonyms/meronyms);
- multitude of denominational paths and terminological variants;
- borrowings, structural and conceptual layers;
- phraseological units (collocations) in specialist speech.

Translators of texts on childhood struggle with such problems, being obliged to take into account in documentary research the type of specialist text or to create a new term corresponding to the type of translated text.

III. Translational issues

Selected texts, albums and documentaries that speak about the spirit of childhood (watching and tasting things, looking at people and the world with delight, as if “for the first time”) can be studied in three types of translations (also after editing):

Translation of popular texts for children aged 8 to 14 (documentary albums on various scientific disciplines and professional activities, dictionaries and encyclopaedias):

- monolingual translation (reformulation) in transition from a specialist text to a popularized text and a comparison of reformulation techniques in two languages;
- discursive determinants of popularization of science (especially metaphor and personalization, questioning, etc.) and their translation;
- register variants (standardized term and child-adapted term).

Translation of literary texts for children and young people, especially stories of people, including stories of holy children (e.g. Francisco and Jacinta Marto) or stories about saints (e.g. John Paul II) for children and young people:

- translation or adaptation,
- translation of neologisms, etc.,

Intersemiotic translations of documentaries for children:

- multimodal translation,
- multimodal automatic translation,
- audio description.

Submission of proposals (summaries of articles, about 1200 characters with spaces), indicating the purpose, problem addressed, theoretical framework, methodology; containing 5 keywords, 3–5 selected bibliographic references (books/articles); the name and surname, scientific affiliation, e-mail address of the author(s); sent in Word or PDF format to: lingrom@kul.pl; using APA citation, https://czasopisma.tnkul.pl/index.php/rh/citation.

Article proposals that have been accepted by the Editorial Committee can be sent to https://czasopisma.tnkul.pl/index.php/rh/about/submissions. They will be forwarded for evaluation by two independent experts.

Languages of publication: French, Spanish, Italian, Polish.

Schedule
May 31, 2025: Submission of applications (abstracts of articles)
June 15, 2025: Notification of acceptance based on abstracts
December 31, 2025: Submission of full articles
February 15, 2026: Sending of reviews
March 31, 2026: Submission of corrected articles
September–November 2026: Publication.