TRANSLATION SOLUTIONS FOR DEALING WITH AMBIGUITY IN ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND
TRANSLATION SOLUTIONS FOR DEALING WITH AMBIGUITY IN ALICE’S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND

Summary/Abstract: Translation solutions for dealing with ambiguity in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This paper shows how different types of ambiguity embedded in the matrix of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (the 1993 edition) are dealt with in two prestigious Romanian translations – Frida Papadache’s Peripeţiile Alisei în Ţara Minunilor (1976) and Antoaneta Ralian’s Alice în Ţara Minunilor (2007) – as a tribute to the international appeal of Alice. My focal aim is to present a comparative analysis of the methods employed in translating Carroll’s equivocal lexical items, which make it increasingly difficult to match grammatical categories with function. This paper also aims at describing disambiguation techniques applied primarily in determining if the two translators managed to reinforce the original textual leeway at their disposal in the pure spirit of Carroll. My analysis relies heavily on Dirk Delabastita’s translation strategies as precautionary measures to cope with Carroll’s specialized type of literary discourse. The findings submitted by this paper are consistent with the idea that translating Carroll’s craft unavoidably entails a partial loss of meaning, brought about by the yawning gap between the intended message and interpretation, which can result in either overtranslation or undertranslation. The extensive use of double-entendre in the source-text cannot be recoded entirely in the target language, despite the translators’ excellent command of English.

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