Grammatičeskie trudnosti v chudožestvennom perevode russkojazyčnich učastnikov konkursa “Kul’turnyj most”

Although for bilingual children translation activities play a major role in the natural acquisition of two languages, the acquisition of translation skills is challenging for them, too. In recent years, works on Russian as a heritage language have increasingly included not only linguistic but also translation difficulties of bilingual children. Bilingual children are clearly interested in translation activities, but without special training their competence in this area remains most often spontaneous, and the main strategy in most cases is word-for-word translation. Thanks to our participation as a jury member in different seasons of the “Cultural Bridge” competition, we collected a corpus of 327 texts (including originals in Russian and their translations into Italian) and created two parallel corpora (Russian and Italian) to process the language data with the software Sketch Engine. The contrastive analysis revealed approximately the same typology of errors of bilingual children as in other scholars’ work analysing examples of translation of Russian literary texts into Italian.