Abstract
Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland is one of the best examples of the literary nonsense genre. The paper mainly regards nonsense as a rhetoric device for humour and amusement and seeks to examine Carroll’s nonsense creation devices mainly at the lexical level, and at the same time explore the strategies the Chinese translator Zhao Yuanren adopts in his translation. The paper finds out that there is a direct correlation between Carroll’s devices of nonsense creation and Zhao’s strategies in translating them. The strategies Zhao adopts show his creativity and experimentation in dealing with the seemingly untranslatable elements of humorous nonsense to achieve fidelity to the essence of the original work. In reconstructing Carroll’s nonsense, Zhao adheres as closely as he could to reproduce the comic effect of the original by different means of creation. In this sense, his translation is creative fidelity.
Highlights
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, is among the children’s classics of most popularity and significance
Based on Delabastita’s nine translation techniques for wordplay (1993: 191-221), this paper proposes the following translation strategies for lexical nonsense: 1) Nonsense into nonsense, in which the ST nonsense is transferred into a TT nonsense, which may or may not share the same properties of the ST nonsense
Despite the vast difference between Chinese and English, Zhao translated most of the lexical nonsense into nonsense mainly by creating a complete new one or providing a partial substitution, faithfully and creatively reconstructing a wonderland in the Chinese context
Summary
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865), written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll, is among the children’s classics of most popularity and significance. ‘The production of nonsense in prose and poetry is a mode of creative writing characterised by deliberate and repeated deviations from sense, either linguistic or conceptual, while maintaining a careful balance between sense and its absence so that the resulting text still conveys a message in which the reader can find meaning, though there will be disagreement about its interpretations.’ (OreroClavero 2002: 60) She divided the active nonsense creation devices briefly into two categories, lexical devices and logical devices which work at the syntactic level. The similarity in form and pronunciation makes a big contrast with the vast difference in meaning, producing funny lexical nonsense
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callMore From: International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies
Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
