Edited by Margherita Dore
[Topics in Humor Research 11] 2022
► pp. 41–62
Plays on words, humorous or not, pose serious challenges to the translator, as Dirk Delabastita (1997), among many others, has stated. Self-translators know the intended communicative effect behind the puns, giving them a privileged perspective regarding their translation. This is the case with author Nancy Huston, born in 1953 in Alberta, Canada, and residing permanently in France since 1973. She started using self-translation consistently after discovering she could thereby improve her work, which regularly includes wordplays.
This work looks at puns from two of her earlier self-translated novels, comparing Huston’s English and French version to see how she deals with the complexity they entail. Following Delabastita’s typology of puns (1996: 128, 2014: 604), Huston’s puns are both vertical and horizontal wordplay, display paronymy and homophony as well as many more aspects. This chapter comments on cases of pun-to-pun translation, pun-to-alliteration, pun-to-no pun, etc. Huston herself claims she desires the two versions to be as alike as possible (Mi-Kung YI, 2001), and this article aims at confirming this.