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TRANSLATION AS TRANSFORMATION: ON THE TREATMENT OF PUNS AND WORDPLAY IN ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF JINPINGMEI

The novel Jinpingmei is rife with various forms of language play, which produces special stylistic or poetic effects and contributes to characterization. Language play in Jinpingmei gives rise to cognitive effects on the reader and poses a serious challenge to interlingual translation. However, it has hitherto received little attention from translation studies researchers. The issue of how different forms of language play are treated in English translations of Jinpingmei has not been touched upon. This article aims to fill the gap by analyzing and discussing the translation of puns and wordplay in Jinpingmei. It takes a cognitive-pragmatic view and draws upon a relevance-theoretic approach to examine the way in which puns and wordplay is rendered into the target language. Within the relevance-theoretic framework, translation is viewed as an “interpretive use of language” and the relation between source and target texts is based on interpretive resemblance rather than equivalence (Sperber & Wilson, 1986; Gutt, 1991). The analysis undertaken in the article is based on two English translations of Jinpingmei. Following Delabastita’s (1996) taxonomy of puns and transferring strategies, the article examines the translators’ translation strategies and assesses the degree of relevance and interpretive resemblance achieved in the two translations vis-à-vis the source text. Research results demonstrate that most puns and wordplay are lost or misconstrued in translation and that the translators exhibit different patterns in their approaches to translating wordplay in Jinpingmei. Moreover, the degree of interpretive resemblance achieved in the two translations differs significantly. The article concludes that the translators’ choice is influenced by translational skopos, the sociocultural context of translation and reception, and the (un)translatability of wordplay effected by the linguistic and cultural difference between Chinese and English.  Article visualizations: