Special features speech portrait of an autistic child in Mark Haddon’s novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time translated into Russian

The article deals with the issue of studying the speech characteristics of a literary character, which is no doubt of significant interest. The speech portrait of a literary character is one of the key components in forming an image in a literary text. However, the speech of child characters, especially those with developmental disorders, has not received much attention. The source material for the study is the modern novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003) by Mark Haddon and its translation into Russian made by A. Kukley (2003). The paper’s main purpose is to enumerate, classify, and analyze the complex speech portrait of a child with an autism spectrum disorder and to examine the methods used for translating these characteristics. The study draws upon the classification that focuses on the impairments in socialization, communication, and imagination, which are central to autism research. The author’s methodology, based on the use of the continuous sampling method, classification method, comparative analysis method, and quantitative method, allowed to reach some conclusions and observations. The author claims that the majority of the speech characteristics typical of a teenager with autism are preserved in the translated text. According to the author, the translator carefully conveys these characteristics into another language, sometimes making changes considering the context, nuances of a language structure, and cultural differences, which requires certain adaptations in order to render meaning and emotions more precisely.