I diritti di bambini e ragazzi: la Convenzione ONU sui diritti dell’infanzia e dell’adolescenza tra divulgazione e semplificazione

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is the most widely ratified human rights treaty in history and sets out children’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. From a linguistic and subject-specific perspective, the CRC is a typical international convention, which is most likely incomprehensible to children. To help children understand the Convention, various organisations have reformulated and recontextualised it to create child-friendly (CF) versions in many languages. This paper presents a micro-analysis of four CF posters explaining the rights enshrined in the CRC in English and Italian. The comparison of the CF versions with the original CRC revealed that the reformulation and recontextualization entailed a change in genre (from convention to poster) and a shift in focus (from States Parties to children), which led to the use of different linguistic strategies to refer to the target readers and to various degrees of child-centredness.