tc dokuz eylül university institute of social sciences translation and ...

One remaining fact Delabastita suggests is that the technical difficulties are
such that translators often have to go out of their usual way to tackle the puns in a
manner which they themselves, their patrons or employers, and their prospective
audiences will think is appropriate. It is well known that translators always have to
make decisions or choices weighing 'loss' against 'gain' and pondering the pros and
cons of some 'sacrifice' or other (Delabastita, 1997; 11).
A. What is the role of pun translation in Translation Studies?
'The study of wordplay takes one to the heart of the study of communication'
(Delabastita, 1997; 9). This claim of Delabastita’s exemplifies how the pun relates
meaning to form, intention to understanding, semantics to pragmatics, langue to
parole, rhetoric control to inept or purposeless expression, and cuts across virtually
all genre or text type distinctions. Yet, pun study has not drawn the attention it
deserves by either professionals or language experts. As translation studies are quite
new compared to other disciplines anyway, it is needless to say that there is not much
work done in the field of pun translation.
It is hardly surprising that any systematic attention to wordplay and ambiguity
in the theoretical reflection about translation has also been of fairly recent date. This
is not to deny the truism that the notion of the pun's untranslatability has been around
for a long time. Only recently have various trends and schools of thought such as
post-structuralism -mentioned above-, psychoanalysis, Marxism and pragmatics dealt
with this issue (ibid.) 2 .
Especially in Turkey, one can hardly find literature or articles on the issue.
The only sources found while researching for this study are three articles, one of
which is by Zuhal Toral Barda in the most prominent translation magazine,
Çeviribilim ve Uygulamaları. Her study brings Alice in Wonderland under
2
Studies on pun translation see: McKerras, Robert (1994). ‘How to translate Wordplays’, Notes on
Translation 8(1): 7-18; Delabastita,Dirk. (1987). ‘Translating Puns. Possibilities and Restraints’, New
Comparison 3:143-59; Mateo, Marta (1994) ‘The Translation of Irony’, in Clem Robyns (ed)
Translation and the (Re)production of Culture. Selected papers of the CERA Research Seminars in
Translation Studies 1989-1991, Leuven: The CERA Chair for Translation, Communication and
Cultures, 125-38; Offord, Malcolm (1990). ‘Translating Shakespeare’s Word Play’, in Peter Fawcett
and owen Heatcote (eds) Translation in Performance: Papers on the Theory and Practice of
Translation, Bradford Occasional Papers 10, Bradford: University of Bradford Department of Modern
Languages, 101-140
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