Translating puns in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Abstract

Abstract This paper takes a pragmatic perspective and draws upon a relevance-theoretic approach to examine how the issue of (un)translatability is addressed in English to Chinese translation, based on three Chinese translations of the English classic Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland taken from three significant periods in China’s contemporary literary and socio-economic history. Pun emerges in the novel, which has been renowned for its “impossibility” to be translated, as the most outstanding type of (un)translatability. A successful translation under the relevance-theoretic framework, which views translation as a communicative act, calls for an interpretive resemblance between source text and target text rather than equivalence (Sperber and Wilson 1986; Gutt 1991, 2014). This paper takes the translation of puns in Alice in Wonderland, as a case study, and employs Delabastita’s (1996) typology of puns and translation methods to analyse and contrast the three translators’ strategies. By assessing the degree of relevance achieved in the three translations and to what extent the new relevance resembles the original one, this study finds that the translators show different patterns in their approaches towards (un)translatability. The socio-cultural environments and the translators’ own subjectivity are found to be major contributive factors in communicating what’s deemed relevant to the target text audience.