The humour of wordplays in the Chinese novel Journey to the West. A traveller onboard?

Authors

  • Tian Mi University of Nankai
  • Rodrigo Muñoz Cabrera University of Nankai

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32870/mycp.v11i33.824

Keywords:

humour, wordplays, translation, Spanish, Chinese

Abstract

A language is a means by which any society sees and describes the world and life. Translating humour is not an easy task, especially if the aim is to translate a seven-hundred-year-old text from such diverse culture as the Chinese one. Wordplays are a source to propagate irony, double meaning and humour. However, in the Chinese culture there exist some resources that are extremely difficult to be translated into Spanish, such as characters with a different meaning, but with similar pronunciation. The meaning of these topics is unknown to Spanish speakers. We aimed to study the methods used to translate the wordplays of the Chinese book Journey to the West into Spanish and to analyze how translators have negotiated linguistic barriers to translate all the meaning they possess into Spanish.

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Published

2022-08-31 — Updated on 2022-12-16

Versions

Issue

Vol. 11 No. 33 (2022): September-December

Section

Analysis

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