Some difficulties in Russian translation
Written translation as well as oral one presents itself a complex and manifold process. Translation from English into Russian is not just a simple substitute of words from the English language by the Russian words. In English Russian translation we face the conflict of two completely different cultures, levels of development, customs and traditions. The main task of a translator is to remember and take into account all the difficulties of translation and render the author’s thought as accurate as possible using different literal devices employed originally by the author.
This article is devoted to one of the most difficult objects for literal translation, i.e. pun.
There is no full understanding of puns nature in linguistics yet and the consequences of it are observed in terminological variety. This stylistic device is often called “play on words”, “equivocality”, etc.
A translator rendering English pun into Russian should perform a super task: he must render a pun with a maximum literal accuracy if it really has an idea meaning in the work under translation. In cases where the pun is based on play on sounds, a translator can create his own play on sounds in order to reach the funny effect, at which the author aimed originally. Untranslated fun happens rather rarely, but even then a translator can miss translation of pun into Russian here and create it in another episode, where the author meant no play on words.
Unlike the translation of usual English text into Russian when its content (heroes, connotations, author’s style) must be transformed into another language form, in funs translation the form of original should be rendered as well. More than that, a translator rather often has to change the content to preserve the form of the fun. It happens sometimes as plane of expression is more important than plane of content while translating the literal work from any language into Russian. E.g. “Alice in Wonderland” by Luise Carroll presents a real teaching book for pun investigators: “Mine is a long and a sad tale! Said the Mouse… It is a long tail, certainly”, said Alice… “but why do you call it sad?” Here the pun is based on homonymy of words \”tale - tail\” where the leading element is tail. A lot of translators preserved this element of pun, but each in his own way. Thus, translator Solovyova uses the words of similar sounding: “хвастунья - хвастунья”. Demurova has translated it as \”прохвост - про хвост\”. Of course, the change of one component led to the changes in semantic and stylistic of the pun itself. But the thing is worth the effort. In cases when translating to Russian it is completely impossible to use at least one of the components of pun, a translator resorts to the total change of semantics. It happens when the plane of expression dominates the plane of content. Thus, in the same pun by Luise Carrolle the sentence “We called him Tortoise because he taught us” is translated into Russian by Demurova in the following way: “Мы звали его Спрутиком, потому что он всегда ходил с прутиком”.
So, one can come to conclusion: a precise English Russian translation of a pun (rendering of both expression and content) for which strives every translator can be reached only as an exception. As a rule, one should choose either a form of a meaning, and the decision depends on a set of premises, but first of all it depends on the context demands, and rather often on the context of the whole work.