From Chinese Classic to South Korean Adaptation: A Multimodal Analysis of Transmedia Cultural Mediation in Journey to the West’s Animated and Television Versions

1 Introduction

The interlingual adaptation of literary classics across media platforms necessitates a complex negotiation between linguistic transformation, audience considerations, and medium-specific affordances. This phenomenon finds particularly compelling manifestation in the divergent English adaptations of Journey to the West, where distinct versions crafted for child versus adult audiences illuminate critical questions about systematic variation in translation methodology relative to viewer demographics and presentational formats. The current investigation employs a purpose-built parallel corpus comprising two representative adaptations, the Little Fox animated series targeting 6–12 years old and the 1986 CCTV television series for general audiences, to address two fundamental research questions: What quantifiable systematic differences exist in lexical sophistication and syntactic structures between these audience-specific adaptations? How do the linguistic characteristics of animation voice-over narration versus television series dialogue reflect intrinsic medium-specific properties?

Contemporary scholarship in audiovisual translation studies (Bogucki and Deckert 2020) and media linguistics has increasingly emphasized the imperative for empirical examination of how audience age parameters and medium conventions collectively shape translation outcomes. While existing research has delineated broad principles of linguistic simplification in children’s literature translation (McMartin and Van 2020), the precise linguistic mechanisms through which adaptations modulate complexity across age cohorts remain insufficiently explored. Similarly, although the distinctive narrative architectures of animation versus live-action drama have been thoroughly documented (Pallant 2021), their linguistic manifestations in translated versions have attracted surprisingly limited academic scrutiny.

This study aims to advance the field through three substantive contributions. First, it provides a rigorous, corpus-driven analysis of gradational variation in lexical and syntactic adaptation strategies along the child-to-adult audience spectrum. Additionally, it elucidates how medium-determined features, particularly the animation voice-over/television dialogue dichotomy, fundamentally condition translation decisions. What’s more, by integrating quantitative linguistic profiling with qualitative discourse analysis, it establishes a novel analytical framework that bridges theoretical constructs from translation studies and media linguistics. The findings yield actionable insights for translation practitioners, media adaptation specialists, and educational content developers working across diverse platforms and audience segments.

2 Literature Review

The interplay between cross-media adaptation and linguistic adaptation constitutes a critical nexus in contemporary media studies, where textual transformations are increasingly shaped by technological affordances, cultural localization, and audience stratification. While existing scholarship has extensively mapped theoretical frameworks for analyzing cross-media narratives (Jenkins 2006; Kress & van Leeuwen 2001), few studies systematically quantify how linguistic features adapt to divergent audience needs across media formats. Journey to the West, as one of the most frequently adapted classical texts globally, offers a unique empirical lens to investigate these dynamics. Its multilingual translations and multimodal reinterpretations – spanning literature, film, animation, and gaming – provide a rich corpus for examining how audience-oriented strategies manifest in lexical, syntactic, and narrative dimensions.

3 Methodology

This study employs a mixed-methods corpus-driven approach to investigate audience-oriented linguistic adaptation strategies in cross-media adaptations of Journey to the West, with a focus on quantifying lexical and syntactic divergences between animation and television adaptations while identifying medium-specific linguistic signatures. The research design integrates quantitative corpus linguistics, comparative statistical analysis, and qualitative discourse examination to systematically address two research questions: (1) systematic differences in linguistic complexity across audience-stratified adaptations and (2) medium-specific linguistic features shaped by narrative modes (voiceover vs. dialogue). The methodology is structured around four phases – corpus construction, data annotation, quantitative-qualitative analysis, and statistical validation – ensuring methodological transparency and replicability.

The self-built bilingual corpus comprises two primary components: (1) the Little Fox Animation Corpus, containing English subtitles from 108 episodes of Journey to the West animations explicitly targeting children aged 6–12, with 63,301 tokens, selected for its role as a culturally proximate non-Chinese mediator with glocalization strategies, measurable child-oriented standards, and standardized cross-cultural comparability for exporting Asian cultural content (Jin and Yoon 2017; Kim et al. 2018). (2) the 1986 CCTV TV Series Corpus, including original Chinese subtitles and official English subtitles from the 25-episode television series aimed at general audiences, with 89,031 tokens. The Little Fox animation’s target demographic of 6–12-year-olds is explicitly confirmed by its distribution as EFL pedagogical material through graded reading programs (Little Fox Education 2023), with linguistic features systematically calibrated to this age group’s comprehension abilities. While the 1986 CCTV series was broadcast as “general audience” programming, contemporary Chinese media contexts understood this classification as primarily serving adults and older youth, with children expected to access content through family mediation with adult explanation, unlike Little Fox’s self-contained pedagogical design for independent child viewing (Wang et al. 2023). Metadata for both corpora document critical variables such as media type (animation vs. TV drama), audience demographics (age group, cultural familiarity), and narrative mode (voiceover narration in animation vs. dialogue-driven scripts in TV dramas). Data extraction was conducted using Subtitle Edit 4.0, followed by manual verification to ensure accuracy and consistency. Non-linguistic elements (e.g., sound effect descriptions, timestamps) were systematically removed to isolate textual data for analysis.

To enable granular linguistic analysis, the corpus underwent multi-layered annotation using computational and manual techniques. Part-of-speech (POS) tagging and syntactic dependency parsing were performed using Stanford CoreNLP (Manning et al. 2014) and spaCy (Honnibal et al. 2020), which provided automated identification of grammatical categories (nouns, verbs, adjectives) and syntactic structures (clause coordination, passive constructions). Manual annotation focused on culture-specific terms (e.g., Buddhist idioms) and medium-specific markers (e.g., voiceover segments in animation). XML markup was applied to encode metadata, including scene context (action, dialogue, narration) and audience targeting parameters (age-appropriateness, cultural localization level). Quantitative analysis prioritized three dimensions: lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, and medium-specific divergence. Lexical complexity was operationalized through type-token ratio (TTR), lexical density (ratio of content words to function words), and frequency of culture-bound terms. Syntactic complexity metrics included mean sentence length (measured in words per sentence), clause coordination index (C/M unit ratio), and passive voice frequency. Statistical comparisons between the animation and TV corpora were conducted using independent t-tests and ANOVA in R (R Core Team 2023), with significance thresholds set at *p* < 0.05. To visualize patterns, Tableau generated heatmaps contrasting lexical-syntactic profiles across media types.

Qualitative discourse analysis complemented quantitative findings by examining how narrative modes shape linguistic adaptation. Voiceover narration in the Little Fox animations was analyzed using Biber’s (1988) multidimensional framework to identify register features (e.g., informational vs. involved discourse), while TV drama dialogues were assessed for pragmatic strategies (e.g., turn-taking patterns, speech act distribution). Cultural localization strategies were scrutinized through close reading of key terms, such as the translation of culturally specific concepts (e.g., retention of “Guanyin” vs. domestication as “Goddess of Mercy”). The integration of quantitative and qualitative methods ensures a holistic understanding of how audience stratification and media affordances jointly shape linguistic adaptation.

4 Findings

Through a rigorous comparative analysis of the Little Fox animated series corpus and the 1986 CCTV television series corpus, this study systematically examines the quantitative impact of medium-specific constraints and target audience considerations on the English translation strategies employed in Journey to the West adaptations across four key dimensions: lexical, syntactic, narrative, and pragmatic features. As demonstrated in Table 1, the analysis reveals statistically significant gradational differences in lexical complexity (all p < 0.001) that extend beyond surface-level metrics to reflect deliberate linguistic adaptation strategies tailored to distinct audience demographics.

The lexical complexity metrics exhibit clear bifurcation patterns. The animated corpus displays significantly lower Type-Token Ratio (TTR = 0.28) compared to the television version (TTR = 0.35, p < 0.001), indicating strategic lexical simplification for younger audiences. Frequency analysis conducted via AntConc 3.5.8 shows that content words (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) constitute only 58.7 % ( ± 2.1 %) of the 63,301-token animated corpus, while function words (prepositions, conjunctions, articles) account for 41.3 %, a distribution that aligns with established principles of child language acquisition by enhancing syntactic predictability and textual cohesion. In contrast, the 89,031-token television corpus manifests an inverse distribution with 67.2 % ( ± 1.8 %) content words and 32.8 % function words, reflecting its prioritization of semantic density (animation: 54.1 % vs television: 61.3 %, p < 0.001) to accommodate richer cultural information and more complex conceptual content.

Advanced lexical profiling using Wordsmith 7.0 further elucidates these adaptations. The animated corpus demonstrates 82 % coverage by the BNC top 1,000 word list, with a mean frequency of 148.7 occurrences per 10,000 words and minimal Academic Word List (AWL) representation (1.2 %) – characteristics indicative of a tightly controlled lexical system designed for L2 learners. Conversely, the television corpus shows greater lexical sophistication with 68 % BNC top 1,000 coverage, lower mean frequency (89.4/10,000 words), and substantially higher AWL presence (4.7 %), preserving the source text’s literary nuances. The Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) analysis confirms this pattern, with the television corpus scoring 26.5 % higher (78.9 vs 62.4, p = 0.001) on lexical difficulty metrics. Morphological analysis reveals the animated corpus’ words average 4.1 letters compared to the television version’s 5.3 letters (p < 0.001), while Flesch-Kincaid readability scores (animation: 85.2 [“very easy”] vs television: 72.6 [“standard”]) correspond to approximately two grade levels’ difference in reading difficulty (Kincaid et al. 1975), providing robust empirical evidence of audience-driven adaptation strategies.

As quantitatively demonstrated in Table 2, the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu 2010) reveals fundamentally divergent syntactic architectures between the corpora.

The Little Fox animation manifests prototypical “oral simplification” (Tavakoli and Foster 2008), with markedly shorter T-units (7.2 words), lower clause density (0.38/clause), and reduced subordinating conjunction frequency (12.3/1 k words). Its 4.1 % passive construction rate and inflated coordinate conjunction usage (23.5/1 k words, 1.8 × the TV series) collectively establish a syntactically transparent system favoring paratactic progression – a design strategically reducing cognitive load for child audiences. Conversely, the CCTV television corpus exhibits “literate complexity” (Biber and Gray 2010; Qin and Kong 2018) through extended T-units (14.7 words), dense subordination (1.12 clauses/sentence), and frequent passive voice (11.3 %). The 28.6/1 k words subordinator frequency and 2.4–3.1 × greater adverbial/relative clause usage construct an embedded syntactic network that meticulously preserves the source text’s classical cadence while conveying intricate spatiotemporal relationships and psychological depth.

5 Discussion

The empirical findings emerging from this large-scale comparative analysis of the Little Fox animated series and CCTV television series adaptations of Journey to the West present a complex picture of how linguistic adaptation strategies are systematically modulated by the interplay between target audience considerations and medium-specific constraints. At the lexical level, the dramatic 26.5 % disparity in Lexical Frequency Profile scores between the animated corpus (62.4) and television corpus (78.9) cannot be adequately explained through simple reference to word frequency differences alone, but rather reflects fundamentally divergent approaches to vocabulary selection rooted in distinct communicative purposes. The animated version’s rigorous limitation to high-frequency vocabulary (82 % coverage by BNC top 1,000 words) creates what might be termed a “pedagogically optimized” lexical environment where the 98.14 % text coverage threshold identified by Laufer and Nation (1995) as necessary for unassisted comprehension is carefully maintained through strategic repetition of core items (mean frequency = 148.7 occurrences per 10,000 words), while simultaneously excluding potentially problematic low-frequency lexemes that might disrupt the young L2 learner’s reading fluency (Schmitt et al. 2011). This lexical simplification strategy extends beyond mere word selection to encompass morphological dimensions as well, with the animated corpus’ words averaging just 4.1 letters in length compared to the television version’s 5.3 letters, a statistically significant difference (p < 0.001) that reflects conscious avoidance of polysyllabic Latinate derivatives in favor of shorter Germanic-based words that are more easily decoded by developing readers. The television adaptation, by contrast, demonstrates a markedly different lexical philosophy through its intentional incorporation of lower-frequency vocabulary (32 % beyond the 1,000 most common words), including numerous culture-specific terms like “arhat” (罗汉) and “asura” (阿修罗) that preserve the source text’s religious and philosophical nuances, albeit at the cost of increased lexical difficulty that would likely render the text inaccessible to the animation’s target demographic. What proves particularly revealing is not merely the existence of these lexical differences, but their precise quantification and systematic patterning, which collectively suggest an almost mathematical precision in how audience design parameters translate into concrete linguistic choices, a finding that challenges more intuitive, less empirically grounded models of adaptation strategy selection that have dominated much of the audiovisual translation literature to date.

Moving beyond lexical considerations to syntactic architecture, the data reveal equally profound and carefully calibrated differences in how information is packaged and presented across the two media forms. The animated corpus’ preference for shorter T-units (averaging just 7.2 words compared to the television version’s 14.7 words) reflects what psycholinguistic research has identified as the cognitive constraints of working memory capacity in child learners, specifically the “7 ± 2” information chunking threshold proposed by Miller (1956), suggesting that the adaptors have intuitively or deliberately structured their syntax to align with developmental cognitive limitations (In’nami et al. 2022). This syntactic simplification is further evidenced by the animation’s heavy reliance on coordinate conjunction (23.5 instances per 1,000 words, 1.8 times more frequent than in the television version), which creates what Halliday (1989) describes as “paratactic transparency” - a linear, additive sentence structure that maximizes processing ease while sacrificing the informational density achievable through more complex embedding strategies. The television adaptation, unconstrained by such developmental considerations, freely employs sophisticated hypotactic structures including center-embedded relative clauses (constituting 17.4 % of all subordinate clauses) and left-dislocated adverbial phrases (23.1 % of subordination), which while posing greater processing challenges, enable the preservation of classical Chinese narrative rhythms and the intricate interweaving of multiple narrative threads that characterize the original literary work. Particularly noteworthy is the television version’s significantly higher frequency of passive constructions (11.3 % versus the animation’s 4.1 %), which serves not only as a marker of formal register but also as a crucial mechanism for maintaining the original text’s thematic emphasis on fate and predestination through constructions like “the scriptures are guarded by divine law” that position characters as recipients rather than initiators of action. The systematic nature of these syntactic differences strongly suggests that media adaptors operate with an implicit (and sometimes explicit) understanding of how grammatical complexity interacts with audience comprehension, and that their choices reflect careful calibration rather than arbitrary simplification or complexification. The interdependent nature of audience and medium factors becomes particularly evident when examining how each adaptation leverages its format’s unique affordances to address viewer capabilities. The animation’s hybrid narration-dialogue structure (43.7 % narration) exemplifies this synergy: the medium’s conventional use of voiceover (Pallant 2021) is strategically deployed to scaffold child viewers’ comprehension through explicit mental state explanations (e.g., Sun Wukong felt proud of his trick), while simultaneously compensating for animation’s limited ability to convey subtle psychological cues through facial expressions alone. Conversely, the television series’ exclusive reliance on dialogue capitalizes on live-action’s strength in conveying subtext through actors’ performances, a approach viable for its adult audience’s stronger inferential abilities but potentially challenging for children. This demonstrates how what might appear as simple audience adaptations are in fact carefully mediated through the distinctive storytelling toolkit of each medium.

The narrative structure differences between the two adaptations prove equally revelatory when examined through the lens of contemporary narrative theory. The animated version’s hybrid format combining third-person omniscient narration (constituting 43.7 % of the total text) with character dialogue creates what might be termed a “scaffolded narrative” environment where the narrator assumes responsibility for not only advancing the plot but also explicitly interpreting character psychology (78.5 % of mental state verbs like “think” and “know” occur in narration rather than dialogue), spatial relationships (“the monkey king flew over the mountains”), and temporal connections (“the next day, they continued their journey”) that in the television version must be inferred by viewers from dialogue and contextual clues alone. This narrative explicitness, while potentially reducing interpretive richness, serves the crucial pedagogical function of modeling comprehension strategies for young viewers who are still developing the cognitive apparatus necessary for making such inferences independently. The television adaptation’s exclusive reliance on dialogue (100 % of text, with zero narration) represents not merely a different storytelling technique but what might more properly be considered a different epistemology of narrative understanding, one that requires viewers to construct mental models of character motivation, temporal sequence, and causal relationship through careful attention to conversational implicature, turn-taking patterns (averaging just 2.4 s between speaker changes compared to the animation’s 3.7 s), and what Sperber and Wilson (1986) term “ostensive-inferential communication” where meaning must be actively reconstructed rather than passively received (Carston 2021). The implications of this narrative divide extend beyond mere presentational differences to touch upon fundamental questions about how different media forms construct knowledge and shape interpretive habits in their audiences, with the animated version fostering what might be called “guided literacy” and the television version cultivating “critical viewing competencies” that may have lasting consequences for how audiences engage not just with these particular texts but with narrative media more broadly. The interplay of linguistic simplification and cultural annotation in Little Fox’s adaptation also reflects South Korea’s industrial pragmatism in cultural exports. The animation’s frequent use of metanarrative commentary (e.g., ‘In Chinese culture, the dragon symbolizes good luck’) mirrors strategies seen in Korean-translated manhwa (Jin and Yoon 2017), where culturally specific concepts are explicitly framed for non-native audiences. This differs from both the CCTV series’ implicit cultural encoding (e.g., untranslated honorifics like Dashi 大师) and Western adaptations’ tendency toward cultural substitution (e.g., Waley’s replacement of Guanyin with ‘the Goddess of Mercy’). Such choices underscore how South Korean adaptations recontextualize Chinese cultural capital, not by diluting its distinctiveness but by rendering it legible within global children’s media conventions.

6 Conclusions

This study has systematically investigated the linguistic adaptation strategies in the English translations of Journey to the West across animated and television adaptations, employing a multidimensional analytical framework encompassing lexical, syntactic, narrative, and pragmatic dimensions. The findings reveal that audience-specific design and medium constraints lead to quantifiable and systematic linguistic variations, offering new insights into cross-media translation theory. These findings also underscore that audience considerations and medium constraints operate not as independent variables but as mutually shaping forces in cultural adaptation. The animation’s lexical simplification (82 % BNC top 1,000 words) works precisely because the medium provides visual reinforcement, just as the television series’ syntactic complexity (14.7-word T-units) is sustainable due to its audience’s greater tolerance for delayed payoff in live-action formats.

Methodologically, the integration of corpus-based quantitative analysis (e.g., lexical frequency profiling, syntactic complexity metrics) with qualitative discourse analysis has provided a robust approach to identifying adaptation patterns. This dual-method framework not only enhances the precision of linguistic feature extraction but also captures the dynamic interplay between language simplification and cultural fidelity. Theoretically, this study contributes to audiovisual translation studies by establishing measurable thresholds for audience-oriented adaptations. For instance, the identification of 98 % lexical coverage as critical for child audiences (Laufer and Nation 1995) and the syntactic “7 ± 2” cognitive load limit (Miller 1956) offer actionable guidelines for future adaptations. These findings deepen our understanding of how linguistic choices mediate between source-text authenticity and target-audience accessibility. Practically, the study highlights the importance of tailored strategies: simplified lexico-syntactic structures for pedagogical contexts (e.g., children’s animations) and complex, culturally resonant language for literary preservation (e.g., classic literature adaptations). Such distinctions may be vital for translators, educators, and media producers aiming to balance educational objectives with cultural integrity.