Wordplay and Translation: Special Issue of 'The Translator' 2/2 1996 (Translator S)

Extended Special Issue Spik in Glyph? Translation, Wordplay and Resistance in Chicano Poetry, pp 141-160 Tace Hedrick (Comparative Literature, Penn State Harrisburg, USA)This paper examines the nature of contemporary bilingual Chicano poetry from the 1970s to the present, particularly in terms of the poetic use of bilingual wordplay and the questions it raises about the uses and possibilities of translation. Using Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Task of the Translator' as a touchstone, and positing a metaphorical link between translation and transfer, the paper looks at bilingual wordplay as a kind of bridging-over or translation of one language into the other, crossing and breaking down borders and hierarchies between the two languages. To illustrate this, cultural practices and uses of bilingualism are examined from both a sociolinguistic and a poetic point of view, with examples of how puns, (mis)pronunciations, slang, loanwords, and mixtures of Spanish and English are used in bilingual poetry for formal and polemical effect.   Meaningful Literary Names:Their Forms and Functions, and their Translation, pp 161-178 Luca Manini (Montalto, Italy)Proper nouns, which have a special status within the language system as opposed to common nouns, can be used as characterizing devices in literary texts and so become a meaningful element in the texture of such works. Names can in this way be endowed with an extra semantic load that makes them border on wordplay. The presence of meaningful literary names is likely to cause problems when the text is to be translated, the question being not only whether the transposition of such names in the target language is technically possible, but also to what extent this would be viewed as an appropriate procedure. This paper, which reflects research in progress, explores the issue by analyzing a two-part corpus of texts: The first part consists of twentieth-century Italian translations of English Restoration comedies and the second of Italian translations of Dickens's novels. There are occasional references to other English literary texts from the medieval and Renaissance periods as well. Technical problems of translating proper nouns are taken into consideration, along with other factors which may influence the translator's choices, such as genre, intended audience, cultural tradition and general norms of translation.   The Pitfalls of Metalingual Use in Simultaneous Interpreting, pp 179-198 Sergio Viaggio (United Nations, Vienna, Austria)For the simultaneous interpreter, puns and other instances of metalingual use, involving as they do an interplay of form, content and pragmatic intention, may represent a formidable challenge. The intepreter's most efficient tool is his or her adroitness at determining the pun's or the metalingual comment's relevance on the basis of an instant analysis of the communication situation, with particular attention to the speaker's pragmatic intention and intended sense, as well as the audience's needs and expectations. Actual examples from United Nations meeting are used to illustrate the different factors affecting the rendition of wordplay and metalanguage and some suggestions are made towards improving the training of interpreters.   Caught in the Frame: A Target-Culture Viewpoint on Allusive Wordplay, pp 199-218Ritva Leppihalme (University of Helsinki, Finland)Allusive wordplay-stretches of preformed linguistic material (or frames) that have undergone lexical, grammatical, or situational modification - is so culture-specific that it is not only hard for translators working from a foreign language to translate but easy for them to miss altogether. This paper discusses examples of allusive wordplay in English fiction and journalism and reports on an experiment designed to investigate the recognition of frames and carried out on twenty-one Finnish university students of English. Student translations of some of the examples are also discussed. It is argued that a…