Analysis of Several Coetaneous Translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to Chinese and Spanish

Abstract

This paper discusses wordplay in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and four of its translations, two of them into Chinese and two into Spanish. We contextualize the translations according to the situation of the target language, the social ideology and the translators’ experience. Subsequently, we focus on the analysis of fragments with instances of wordplay in source and target texts, we categorize the translation techniques applied to them, and we describe the effect of the translations of the wordplay. This is followed by a figure which shows a summary of methods of translation of 21 fragments with wordplays. In the conclusion, we relate the translational techniques, their impact and the socio-cultural context in an attempt to explain the decisions made by the translators.