Zhao Yuanren traduttore. Le avventure di Alice in Cina

Since the meaning and effect of wordplays are deeply rooted in the structure of the language in which they are created, how to transpose them in another language is one of the thorniest problems in translation. In his Chinese version of Alice’s adventures in Wonderland, published in 1922, Zhao Yuanren displays a rich array of techniques to successfully reproduce the skopos of the countless wordplays of the source text, often preserving an impressively high degree of formal equivalence. He skillfully switches from one component of the wordplay to another or between different pun types, appealing to all language levels, from the lexical to the graphic one, in order to individuate the target language constituent or device that may allow the recreation of the linguistic ambiguity generating the pun effect. The solutions are obviously Chinese specific, but the strategies to reach them may be a useful reference model when translating into any language.