Contemporary Adaptive Language Models and the Challenges of Literary Translation (in F. Dostoyevsky’s Novel “The Brothers Karamazov”)

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The United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, adopted in 2006, has highlighted the need to find ways of ensuring access to information and full communication for people who have difficulty reading and understanding “standard” literary texts. The authors of the convention highlight the use of specific languages and the development of new methods of presenting text and its formatting. Particular emphasis is placed on the availability of cultural information in appropriate formats. Indeed, this paves the way for a novel approach to language communication. The Convention has provided a catalyst for a new direction in linguistics, namely the comprehension and practical description of the communicative variant of a national language intended for certain groups of its speakers. Practical work has a long history and has undergone significant developments, whereas academic research is still in its infancy. Another parallel process is the general trend towards the need for simplified forms of language, caused by digitalization and the accelerated pace of life, which does not allow for extensive reading and in-depth understanding of texts. As a matter of fact, a revision of the criteria for linguistic norms in "standard" texts is currently being considered. However, it should be noted that the process does not only affect standard texts; the practice of translating complex cultural texts into more comprehensible forms is also on the rise. This encompasses both intralanguage transformations and interlingual translations. The objective of this paper is to elucidate the concepts of "plain" and "easy-to-read" languages, to examine the distinctive characteristics of their operational nuances, and to address the challenges associated with the translation of fictional texts into "easy-to-read language," with a particular focus on F.M. Dostoevsky's novel "The Brothers Karamazov", translated into Japanese.