Facultatea de Litere / Faculty of Letters

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TRANSLATION DIMENSION OF WORDPLAY FROM ENGLISH INTO ROMANIAN
(CEP USM, 2022) Şaganean, Gabriela
The aim of the article is to determine the level of translatability of wordplay (pun) from English into Romanian based on Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, in which the writer used wordplay with communicative and social functions: teasing and provoking both characters and readers, amusing the audience by making it laugh at or with the characters. The corpus of examples proves that wordplay serves to create a communicative effect, be it humorous, attentiongetting or influential. However, it is a complex phenomenon, particularly when translating pun from one language to another. This is because it is based upon linguistic structures which differ from language to language. Therefore, it may be difficult to transfer the meaning of puns from one language to another because of the lack of equivalents in the TL. The study also demonstrates that puns are not untranslatable, and that the effect of a ST pun is possible to be transferred to the TT by providing a corresponding target text pun. When a corresponding pun into the TL is not found, it is replaced with a non-pun and when the translator had no choice and resorted to zero translation, they used editorial techniques to explain the wordplay to the curious readers and future translators.