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Can wordplay go beyond borders?

Alev Balci (Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir) [BIO]

Email: alev.balci@deu.edu.tr

 

ABSTRACT:

A language could perhaps be considered the most fundamental expression of a culture and as we are aware, translation involves not only moving between languages, but also between cultures and the historical contexts of those cultures. Wordplay is an important element of language that is based on shared knowledge: it is culture-specific as well as language-specific, which makes its translation one more size harder.

This paper examines the processes undertaken by various translators while translating wordplay from English into Turkish. For this study the famous literary work Alice in Wonderland will be the source material since it has abundant wordplay which is expertly used by its author, the best word-smith Lewis Carroll.

The corpus covers eighteen different full translations of the selected work over the span of 70 years between 1932 and the 2000’s. The purpose of this study is to display the difficulties in translating wordplay, which is caused by its unique characteristic of having two or more meanings at a time and to observe the attitude of the translators towards a text full of wordplay and their awareness of this literary form throughout the periods in the Turkish literary system. Because the periodical development of the wordplays in Alice in Wonderland has been diachronically observed while analyzing the state of wordplay by looking at the various translations of the selected children’s work from different decades since the 1930’s, a target-oriented descriptive method has been resorted to, taking norm theory as focal point.