Open Your Eyes and Open Them Again: A Comparison of Pun Type Trends and Variants in Two Croatian Translations of Terry Pratchett’s The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky

master's thesis

• Author: Hana Gotovac
• Mentor: Nataša Pavlović (mentor)
• Committee member: Vinko Zgaga (predsjednik povjerenstva)
• Committee member: Kristijan Nikolić (član povjerenstva)
• Granter: University of Zagreb; Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; (Department of English language and literature); Zagreb
• Defense date and country: 2021-05-26, Croatia
• Scientific / art field, discipline and subdiscipline: HUMANISTIC SCIENCES; Philology; Anglistics

Abstract

Wordplay is a staple in many genres, from news titles to fine literature, yet the amount of research on its construction and mechanisms is still scarce. Young translators especially are wondering about puns, how they will mesh with machine translation, how the translators who came before solved the puzzles they present and in what ways these patterns can be recognized and used as aides in future translations. This paper aims to examine whether English and Croatian have different preferences regarding common pun types, as well as whether different translators will favour different types of solutions.
This will be accomplished by examining two books by Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men and A Hat Full of Sky, as well as their translations into Croatian, Tiffany protiv vilinske kraljice by Milena Benini and Šešir pun neba by Marko Maras. All four texts are analysed for the number and types of puns, which are classified according to a combination of Linda Broeder’s expansive pun type classification and an adapted form of Dirk Delabastita’s study of puns and their solutions.
The types of these solutions show that English and Croatian are indeed not always fully compatible, and that a pun type presented in one text is solved with a different type in its translation. Finally, the translators themselves also display individual strategies even when working within the same pun category

• Keywords: wordplay; pun; Terry Pratchett; translation; classification; pun type
• Language: english
• URN:NBN: urn:nbn:hr:131:585429
• Study programme: Title: English Language and Literature (double major); specializations in: Linguistics, Literature and Culture, Translation, TEFL; Course: Translation; Study programme type: university; Study level: graduate; Academic / professional title: magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti (magistar/magistra engleskog jezika i književnosti)
• Type of resource: Text
• File origin: Born digital
• Access conditions: Open access
• Created on: 2021-05-31 21:50:51