Translation of puns and humour in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s adventures in wonderland into Galician

Abstract

Humorous elements having to do with language, for instance puns or witty components, entail an interesting challenge when translating a text,since the humoristic effect needs to be reproduced in the target text for it not to lose its sense. My aim, with this proposal, is to observe how different translators were able to solve the difficulties that the mentioned elements present in a classical work like "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" by Lewis Carroll, which contains a great number of idioms,cultural references, jokes and witty puns with humorous purposes that enrich the text, but that require from the translator a deep knowledge of the source and target languages,anda huge creative capacity. For this purpose, I am going to conducta comparative analysis of two different Galician versions of the original work in English,both of them being complete texts and addressed to a comparable audience. The first of the versions is translated by Teresa Barro and Fernando Pérez Barreiro, published in 1984, and the other one by Xabier Queipo, published thirty-one years later, in 2015. I am going to identify specific instances of puns and other forms of wordplay used by the author to create humorous effects, and analyse the different proposals of the translators toereate a similar effect In the target language.