이상한 나라의 앨리스를 통해 본 언어유희(pun)의 번역

Abstract

Puns or wordplays present the trickiest difficulties for translators - so much so that people often refer to them as untranslatable. This paper does not deal with the long-standing arguments on the dichotomy between translatability and untranslatablity of puns or wordplays. Instead, the main focus is observing how the puns or wordplays in source texts are reproduced in target texts through the mediation of translators. In order to situate the research into perspective, I begin with the review of previous studies. For theoretical background, I examine Delabastita (1996) and adopt his classification of puns and pun translation - homonymy, homophony, homography, and paronymy. Then six Korean translations of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are examined for their treatment of puns. The texts included three translations done for children and three for adults. They were also selected according to publication date and span the period from the earliest to most recent texts. Of the four different types of pun proposed by Delabastita, I focus on the translation of homonymy and homophony, which were most widely used in the source text. As a result of the analysis, three different ways of translating puns were found. The analysis shows that the mediating strategy or translation strategy is decided by the purpose of the target texts.