Traductio : essays on punning and translation

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Traductio : essays on punning and translation

edited by Dirk Delabastita

St. Jerome, 1997

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注記

Includes bibliographical references (p. 290-291) and index

Text in English, with chapters in French

内容説明・目次

内容説明

Nothing like wordplay can make difference between languages look so uncompromising, can give such a sharp edge to the dilemma between forms and effects, can so blur the line between translation and adaptation, or can cast such harsh light on our illusion of complete semantic stability. In the pun the whole language system may resonate, and so may literary traditions and ideological discourses. It follows that the pun does not only put translators to the test, it also poses a challenge to the views and concepts of those who study translation. This book brings together experts on translation and the pun, as well as researchers representing a variety of other relevant disciplines and schools of thought, ranging from theology to deconstruction and from contrastive linguistics to feminism. It can be read as a companion volume to Wordplay and Translation, a special issue of The Translator (Volume 2, Number 2, 1996), also edited by Dirk Delabastita

目次

  • Introduction, Dirk Delabastita, pp 1-22 Signature in Translation, Kathleen Davis, pp 23-43 This paper sets out to show the ways that wordplay is elucidated by post-structuralism and to resolve the confusion concerning Derrida's approach to translatability, particularly in regard to wordplay. Because wordplay refers not to individual words or ideas, but to the systemic operation of a particular language, it comprises the self-referential signature of that language, which may at first seem untranslatable. Deconstruction would argue, however, that the self-reference of a signature can never be totally closed off from its linguistic system
  • therefore it is accessible to translation. Moreover, as a signature, wordplay is not only open to, but also requires the affirmative and contestatory countersignature of another language. Mutual Pun-ishment? Translating Radical Feminist Wordplay: Mary Daly's Gyn/Ecology in German, Luise Von Flotow, pp 45-66 Feminist writing of the 1970s has been viewed in many Western literatures as avant-garde literary work with political clout. It uses wordplay extensively to deconstruct and mock 'patriarchal language' and indicate directions that women's words might take. The translation of this experimental feminist writing has often been undertaken in the name of women's and/or feminist solidarity. Yet, the problems posed by wordplay translation seem to jeopardize 'transnational' goals of feminism as well as ideas about women's shared knowledge and experience. This article focuses on wordplay translation in the German version of Mary Daly's American feminist classic Gyn/Ecology. It sets both the source text and the translation into the context of feminist discursive practices of their time, looks in some detail at the German translator's options and solutions for wordplay translation, and discusses their effects. A Portion of Slippery Stones. Wordplay in Four Twentieth-Century Translations of the Hebrew Bible, Anneke De Vries and Arian J.C. Verheij, pp 67-94 This article provides a general introduction to Biblical wordplay before sixteen passages from the Old Testament are presented that contain instances of punning. These passages exemplify several types of wordplay: homonymy or polysemy, paronymy, and naming. We describe each occurrence and subsequently discuss the renderings found in four recent translations: the New Revised Standard Version, the French La Bible by Andre Chouraqui, the German Die Schrift by Martin Buber, and the Dutch Willibrordvertaling. The findings are checked against several parameters, including the overall orientation of the translation to either source text or target audience, and its editorial policy with respect to annotation. De la traduction juive des jeux de mots sur quelques noms propres hebraiques de la Genese, Francine Kaufmann, pp 95-136 This paper sets out to outline the principles of a Jewish approach to Bible translation through a study of the treatment of wordplays (which are viewed from the double perspective of the Hebrew language and Jewish exegesis). The focus is on naming puns, a literary technique which explicitly documents the authors' deliberate use of wordplay to demonstrate the 'congruence' between the nature of an entity and the biblical Hebrew word that names it. In fact, the biblical authors often insert substantial narrative episodes to justify a name given to a person or place. Three examples from the first chapters of 'Genesis' are analysed: Adam (based on adama, 'soil'), Babel ('confusion'), and Isaac (literally, 'he will laugh'). The paper brings to the fore the explicit and hidden occurrences of the Hebrew root that serves to form the biblical name in question and which derives its situational aptness from the narrative context
  • the essay then moves on to point out the interpretations traditionally put forward by Jewish exegesis. In order to discover to what extent the Jewish translators have taken these semantic networks into account and have tried to reproduce them, five translations are compared: two ancient ones (the Greek Septuagint and the Aramean Onkelos) as well as three contemporary French ones (the versions by the French rabbinate, by Edmond Fleg and by Andre Chouraqui). The paper goes beyond the linguistic constraints involved to consider factors such as ideological bias as well as the extent of the Hebrew original's concrete presence, remoteness or absence. There Must Be Some System in this Madness. Metaphor, Polysemy, and Wordplay in a Cognitive Linguistics Framework, Bistra Alexieva, pp 137-154 One of the basic premises of Cognitive Linguistics is that language is not just a means of communication but also a reflection of the way in which we experience and know the world, both in terms of general experiential and cognitive models that we have as members of the human species, and in terms of the specific application of these models within a particular linguistic and cultural community. Therefore, the expressive means of language - including wordplay - cannot be adequately studied without taking into consideration both the universal nature of human cognition and the language- and culture-specific modification of cognitive structures. This paper discusses wordplay as well as the special translation difficulties it represents in a cognitive framework. It develops the view that wordplay sets in opposition not only meanings but also different domains of knowledge and experience
  • this happens in a way which the different cognitive structuring of another linguistic and cultural community may not enable the translator to reduplicate. Yet, a better understanding of the cognitive mechanisms involved will at least allow us to make more precise predictions about the way the translated version of a pun will function in the recipient culture. Examples are taken from Bulgarian-English translation. The Contextual Use of Idioms, Wordplay, and Translation, Andrejs Veisbergs, pp 155-176 Authors at various times and in a multitude of languages and genres have subjected idioms to some semantic or structural transformation for the sake of creating wordplay. This article will consider the different variants of this rhetorical device from the point of translation. Several translation techniques for this type of wordplay are discussed: the use of an equivalent, loan translation, extension, analogue transformation, substitution, compensation, loss of wordplay, and metalingual comment. The consideration of these techniques also points up a number of priorities to be weighed in individual cases, as well as some of the constraints under which translators have to operate. The author starts from the assumption that translators should strive for equivalent effect. The corpus consists largely of Latvian, German, and Russian translations of Oscar Wilde and Lewis Carroll. The Search for Essence 'twixt Medium and Message. When Hidden Messages Count More Than the Surface Message..., Douglas R. Hofstadter, pp 177-206 Ever since the author's Goedel, Escher, Bach was published in 1979, the idea of translating it into other languages loomed as a formidable challenge, given that parts of the English original are permeated by wordplay of various and complex types. This essay deals with one of the book's dialogues, 'Contracrostipunctus', which is structured as an acrostic - on not just one but two levels. The paper starts by explaining the content and the formal structure of the original dialogue
  • the details of the dialogue's form are very important to an understanding of the translation problems it poses. The essay then moves on to discuss the translation of the dialogue into Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese, concentrating on the stage-by-stage evolution of the French translation in which the author himself got involved. Rewriting the text within the limits of very elaborate formal constraints forces the translator (and the author) into a complex process of prioritizing and negotiating, which prompts basic questions about faithfulness to the 'essence' of a text and the translator's freedom to dispense with 'details'. The essay concludes with some remarks about where the essence of a complex idea lies, and why such processes as translation, paraphrasing, and compression reveal so much about essence. You got the picture? On the polysemiotics of subtitling wordplay, Henrik Gottlieb, pp 207-232 While the discussion of wordplay in translation has focused mainly on written genres, the last decades have witnessed a few studies on the translation of wordplay in comics, a genre integrating filmic visual progression with written dialogue. The present article tries to focus on the even more complex texture of television comedy. On the basis of a discussion of a Danish subtitled version of Carrott's Commercial Breakdown, it is suggested that rather than complicating the successful translation of wordplay, the non-verbal elements creating the basis of much wordplay in television may indeed act as part of the solution. Thus, translating wordplay in an environment as semiotically complex as a satirical television programme is probably no more difficult than translating wordplay in the 'words only' environment of (say) a satirical novel. Although successful subtitling of some of the wordplay found on TV demands media-specific awareness, in the final analysis the overall quality of the outcome depends on the talent of the subtitler. Mapping Shakespeare's Puns in French Translations, Malcolm Offord, pp 233-260 The purpose of this paper is to examine in detail the strategies used by a range of translators to deal with Shakespeare's wordplay. In the first part the author analyses Shakespeare's pun-forming techniques in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Much Ado About Nothing before reviewing the strategies adopted by five twentieth-century French translators in order to convey Shakespeare's punning humour. The second part is an in-depth analysis of one nineteenth-century translator's treatment of the abundant wordplay in Love's Labour's Lost. The conclusions highlight, among other features, the loss of wordplay especially in the translation of Love's Labour's Lost, the large variety of strategies preferred by the different translators, and the lack of a direct correlation between Shakespeare's punning techniques and the strategies adopted by the translators. Traduction, Puns, Cliches, Plagiat, Walter Redfern, pp 261-269 This article suggests some approximate similarities between translation, puns, cliches and plagiarism. For this reason, it switches between English and French, so as to emphasize the straddle-position of the translator and the constant shuttling between two languages. Amongst the authors quoted for their views on such matters are: Joseph Addison, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Valery Larbaud, Jean Cocteau, Michel Tournier, Raymond Queneau, Paul Claudel, George Steiner and Georges Darien. It is argued that the translator should seek to escape the prison-house of his or her native language and, above all, to counter the old song of the untranslatability of wordplay. Some examples are offered of problems surmounted in this area, taken from the author's own translations. What Is It that Renders a Spoonerism (Un)translatable?, Gideon Toury, pp 271-291 Language plays have often been regarded as representing a special challenge to both translators and Translation Studies. In the present paper, one type of language play, English spoonerism and its French counterpart, 'contrepeterie', as well as one of its institutionalized offshoots into literature, German 'Schuttelreim', are discussed in terms of their initial translatability, on the one hand, and their actual behaviour in real translation situations, on the other. Special attention is paid throughout to the humorous function of such language plays, since this function is usually perceived as being central to language plays as such - in addition to their evident function of putting the focus on the utterance for its own sake, a function which in the wake of Roman Jakobson's Linguistics and Poetics has come to be known (somewhat misleadingly) as the 'poetic' function.

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