Wordplay presents a scarcely investigated linguistic phenomenon despite its common and wide presence in written and spoken context. It appears as a significant contribution to the surreal atmosphere in Lewis Carroll’s masterpiece Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and adds the whimsical playfulness to the evergreen fairy-tale. This master’s thesis delves into the world of puns that appear in the original text and investigates the intricate challenges that translators had to deal with when translating them into foreign languages. In our case, we have focused on two foreign translations, the first Slovenian and Spanish versions, titled Alica v Deveti deželi and Alicia en el País de las Maravillas, respectively. The study, based on the theory of translation, begins with a detailed analysis of the ninth and the tenth chapters which officially contain the biggest number of puns. These not only reflect cultural and social references to the Victorian England but also humorously reveal Carroll’s ironic views on the morals and dogmas of that era. The explicitness and historic relation of eighteen puns is furthermore unwound with the help of various translation approaches and Bogo Pregelj’s and Juan Gutiérrez Gili’s translated texts are analysed in order to see how they managed to convey the playful language into the target languages. Both translators successfully recreated the majority of puns but inevitably lost some of them in the translation process. Juan Gutiérrez Gili, on the one hand, achieved a slightly better result, most likely due to certain similarities in English and Spanish, as endings, for instance (the suffix -tion in English is reflexed as suffixes -ción, -zón y -sión in Spanish) which permitted him to recreate wordplay, as well as the historic background and the positive attitude towards foreign texts held in the Spanish territories. On the other hand, Pregelj opted for a somewhat more adapted translation, a choice which reveals as a rather sensible one, keeping in mind the bigger gap between the source and target languages as well as the late development of translation theory in the Slovenian area.
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