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

INTRODUCTION
There are not many people who have not heard of the name Alice, especially
the one in the Wonderland since the famous book Alice in Wonderland by Lewis
Carroll has been translated into more than 80 languages over a century.
This thesis brings into focus the translations of this work that have gained a
lot of attention in the source language as well as in the target languages it has been
translated into. It will explore Alice in Wonderland and more specifically the
wordplay which is abundantly present in Carroll’s literary works. Carroll plays with
language throughout the Alice books which have many witty word plays that also
provide ingenious insights into the very nature of language, into how language
enables the creation of wordplay and why it is so difficult to translate wordplay into
other languages (Weissbrod, 1996; 219). This dissertation aims at analyzing the state
of wordplay in the Turkish literary system by looking at the various translations of
the selected children’s work from different decades since the 1930’s. It will be
interesting to compare their extremely different translations in the target texts. While
comparing them, the specific element that will be taken into consideration will be
puns.
In order to better understand the text and its unique characteristics, the
definition of wordplay and its subtypes are given in the first chapter along with the
information about the selected book and the author.
The first part of the second chapter of this thesis aims at explaining
translation of wordplay, its hardships and different strategies to translate wordplay.
The second part is an overview on the Norm Theory that frames the theoretical
perspective of the thesis.
Chapter three deals with application, where all the puns found in the source
text are taken under examination by comparing their translations in 18 different
target texts between the years 1932 and 2004. In order to analyze the puns and their
translations in Turkish, a number of tables are formed, one of which covers the puns
in the source text with the subtype of each one and with the explanation of why it is
considered wordplay (See Table 1). The next table is formed to show a special type
of pun that is called naming because Carroll used names in his work that have related
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