Wordplay

Wordplay, or punning, refers to textual items that deliberately use (in production or reception, or both) linguistic phenomena such as homonymy, polysemy, and other formal coincidences of language to create double meaning, often with an important humorous component. Wordplay requires metalinguistic awareness and a sense of the arbitrary relationship between signifier and signified. There is linguistic observation, in noticing lexical and morphological coincidences, and there is often a playfulness in presenting casual coincidences as causal relationships. Because wordplay is rooted in the specific forms of a given language (its morphology and its lexical patterns) it is difficult to reproduce in other languages which have different sets of signifier/signified relationships, and any equivalence is indeed sheer coincidence. The idea of playing with words can extend to many figures of speech used in pursuit of forms of expression that are new, creative, fun, striking, innovative, etc. such as acrostics, metaphors, neologisms, alliterations, allegories, and paradoxes. They help to produce new associations and metalinguistic awareness and encourage multiple interpretations. Ambiguity and nonunivocal textual meanings, including hermeneutics, constitute a focus of translational thinking; however, punning has been considered a minor topic for two main reasons: a lack of interest for a device often seen as marginal and inconsequential, and the impression that the task is, too often, impossible. The most prominent scholar to study wordplay translation is Delabastita (1993, 1994, 1996, 1997), attempting, as he does, to propose answers to these and other issues. He studies wordplay translation in relation to canonical literature as represented by Shakespeare, bringing respect and appreciation for punning. Furthermore, he develops the idea of translatability, proposing that it might be a question of degrees of difficulty in finding a solution to each problem posed by wordplay. He proposes a typology of solutions as the result of his rich theoretical work within descriptivism. The topic of wordplay translation is very much alive today due to the proliferation of the device and related research in media translation, advertising, and social networks.