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.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

References

Academia China de Ciencias Sociales. (2018). ?????? [Diccionario chino moderno]. The Commercial Press.

Anónimo. (2006). Viaje al Oeste: las aventuras del Rey Mono (E.P. Gatón & I. Huang-Wang, Trans.). Siruela.

Attardo, S. (1994). Lingüistic theories of humor. Mouton de Gruyter.

Attardo, S. (2002). Translation and humour: an approach based on the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH). The translator, 8(2), 173-194. https:// doi.org/10.1080/13556509.2002.10799131

Attardo, S., Hempelmann, C. F., & Maio, S. D. (2002). Script oppositions and logical mechanisms: Modeling incongruities and their resolutions. Humor, 15(1), 3-46.

Cabré, M. T. (1999). La terminología: representación y comunicación. Elementos para una teoría de base comunicativa y otros artículos. Documenta Universitaria.

Casares, J. (2002). Concepto del humor. Cuadernos de Información y Comunicación, 7, 169-187.

Chen, W. D. (2015). ????? [Introducción a la retórica]. Universidad de Fudan.

Chen, X. Y. (1989). ????? [El secreto del humor]. Zhongguo xiju.

Cuestas, A. D., Zamuner, A., & Datko, F. (2010). Humor y poesía: análisis de las transgresiones a la coherencia desde una perspectiva lingüístico- cognitiva. En V Coloquio Argentino de la IADA” Cohesión y coherencia en la interacción verbal oral” (La Plata, 12 y 13 de octubre de 2010).

Delabastita, D. (2008). Wordplay as a translation problem: A linguistic pers- pective. En H. Kittel, A., Franl, P., Greiner, N. Hermans, T., Koller, W., Lambert, J., & Pual, F. (Eds.), Übersetzung, translation, traduction. (pp. 600-606). De Gruyter Mouton.

Faber, P., & León-Arauz, P. (2014). Specialized knowledge dynamics: from cognition to culture-bond terminology. In R. Temmerman & M. Van Campenhoudt (Eds.), Dynamics and terminology; An interdisciplpinary perspective on monolingual and multilingual culture-bond communication (pp. 135-158). Benjamins.

Jonson, B. (2010). Every man out his humour. Amazon Digital Services LLC. [E-libro].

Ku, M. S. (2019). Viaje al Oeste vs. viaje a la diversión: estrategias de traducción de los elementos culturales de Peregrinación al Oeste. Onomázein, 43, 50-69. https://doi.org/10.7764/onomazein.43.09

Landheer, R. (1995). Relations discursives plurivalentes et traduction. Rela- tions discursives et traduction, 9, 89-106.

Lin, Y. T. (2010). ????? [Autobiografía de Lin Yutang]. Qunyan.

Lu, X. (2006). ?????? [Historia concisa de la ficción china]. Shanghai guji.

Marco, J. (2010). The translation of wordplay in literary texts. Typology, techniques and factors in a corpus of English-Catalan source text and target text segments. Target, 22(2), 264-297. https://doi.org/10.1075/ target.22.2.05mar

Qü, Y. (2009). ?? [Elegías de Chu]. (J. Lin, Trans.). Compañía de libros de Zhonghua.

Raskin, V. (1985). Semantic mechanisms of humor. Reidel.

Si, M. Q. (2002). ?? [Souvenirs históricos]. Historia y Literatura de China.

Siurana, J.C. (2012). Filosofía del humor: estado de la cuestión. Diálogo Filosófico, 28(82), 4-33.

Venuti, L. (1995). The Translator’s invisibility: A history of translation. Routledge.

Wickberg, D. (2014). Etymology of humor. In S. Attardo, (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Humor Studies (pp. 350-351). SAGE Publications. Inc.

Wu, C. E. (2005). ??? [Peregrinación al Oeste]. People’s Literature Publishing House.

Wu, C. E. (2010). Peregrinación al Oeste. (M. Lacea & C. Trigoso, Trans.). Ediciones en Lenguas Extranjeras.

Yue, X. D. (2010). Exploration of Chinese humor: Historical review, empi- rical findings, and critical reflections. Humor, 23, 403-420. https://doi.org/10.1515/humr.2010.018

Downloads

Published

2022-08-31 — Updated on 2022-12-16

Versions

How to Cite

Mi, T., & Muñoz Cabrera, R. . (2022). The humour of wordplays in the Chinese novel Journey to the West. A traveller onboard?. México Y La Cuenca Del Pacífico, 11(33), 129-149. https://doi.org/10.32870/mycp.v11i33.824 (Original work published August 31, 2022)

Issue

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

Section

Analysis

License

Copyright (c) 2022 México y la Cuenca del Pacífico

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Open Access Policy

This journal provides open access to all its contents, in adherence to the principle that making research freely available supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.

MyCP is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, also known as CC BY-NC.

Contents are published in both PDF and XML formats.

Authors who publish in México y la Cuenca del Pacífico must accept the following conditions:

Pursuant to Mexican copyright laws, México y la Cuenca del Pacífico acknowledges and respects the authors’ moral right and ownership of property rights, which will be assigned to the University of Guadalajara to publish the articles in an open-access mode.

México y la Cuenca del Pacífico does not charge the authors any fees for receiving and processing their articles.

Authors are permitted to enter into other independent and additional contractual agreements for the non-exclusive distribution of the article version published in México y la Cuenca del Pacífico (for example, publishing it in an institutional repository or in other printed or electronic media) as long as they clearly state that the piece was originally published in México y la Cuenca del Pacífico.

Pursuant to the above, once the article is approved for publication, authors must send the Assignment of Rights Agreement form duly filled and signed. This form must be sent to mexicoylacuenca@gmail.com as a PDF file.

Readers/users of México y la Cuenca del Pacífico can freely access the journal new issues as soon as they are uploaded. Readers/users are allowed to cite, share (both electronically and physically), print and distribute the material, provided they expressly state that the work was originally published in México y la Cuenca del Pacífico. Contents are to be properly cited and never for commercial purposes.