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Target
Vol. 17:1 (2005) ► pp.71–92

Taking the pun by the horns

The translation of wordplay in James Joyce’s Ulysses

| Roskilde University, Denmark

Taking my starting-point in Maria Tymoczko’s claim (1999) that syntagmatic elements in texts present the greatest challenges to translators and readers of translations, I want to argue that literary translators and translation scholars need to pay greater attention to clusters of wordplay rather than distinguishing puns as individual, separate brain-teasers. Hence, more is at stake in the translation of wordplay than just trying to transfer the source text complexities into the target language. Historical, social and other contextual and intertextual factors must also be taken into consideration. My case in point is an examination of the transfer of highly challenging networks of puns in James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) into Danish and German. The theoretical frame of reference is a discussion of puns in the critical works of Dirk Delabastita, Jonathan Culler, Derek Attridge and Patricia Parker followed by a critique of translator and critic Frank Heibert’s methods of evaluating the German translations.

Keywords: literary translation, puns, wordplay, style, motifs, James Joyce, modernist prose, translation criticism
Article outline
  • Puns: Towards a definition
  • Translating puns: On the horns of a dilemma
    • Examples 1 and 2: “Green rag to a bull” and “Cock and bull story”
    • Examples 3 and 4: “buybull” and “British beautitudes”
    • Examples 5–11: cattle, papal bulls, china shops and dilemmas, bullseye, horns galore and bullawurrus
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 23 March 2006
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.17.1.05kli
References

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Cited by

Cited by 4 other publications

Marco, Josep
2010. The translation of wordplay in literary texts. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 22:2 ► pp. 264 ff. DOI logo
Nissan, Ephraim & Yaakov HaCohen-Kerner
2014. GALLURA and the Challenge of Combining Phono-Semantic Matching with Story-Generation: Zoonomastic Illustration. In Language, Culture, Computation. Computational Linguistics and Linguistics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 8003], ► pp. 780 ff. DOI logo
Vandaele, Jeroen
2011. Wordplay in translation. In Handbook of Translation Studies [Handbook of Translation Studies, 2], ► pp. 180 ff. DOI logo
Williamson, Lee & Raquel De Pedro Ricoy
2014. The translation of wordplay in interlingual subtitling. Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation 60:2 ► pp. 164 ff. DOI logo

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