Özet:

The paper focuses on the possibilities for tackling issues arising from the use of puns and idiom-based wordplays in a text. These issues result from the fact that puns are exploiting, on the one hand, language-specific intralinguistic relations between signs (homonymy, homophony, homography, paronymy, antonymy, word affinities, etc.), which are lost, as a rule, when language is changed, and, on the other hand, polysemy of the word which is only rarely the same in different languages. Both puns and idiom-based wordplays often carry cultural-specific references. Also, most of the idioms are usually derived from the metaphoric associations which are specific to each culture. Considered separately, these wordplays can often seem untranslatable. But incorporated into a text, they assume a particular function, the author intends to produce a certain effect on his audience by using them. And it is this function and this intended effect that forms the sense of the wordplay within the text, the sense which is to be rendered in translation, not the specific words themselves, nor the concrete form of the wordplay, and not necessarily at the same place in the text. The analysis follows the distinction made by Jacqueline Henry among 1/ isolated wordplay; 2/ wordplay integrated in the text; 3/ text, the purpose of which is to play with language. Each of these three cases demands a different approach in relation to the wordplay, which is illustrated with examples from French or English literature and their translations in Russian, Bulgarian and respectively in English or French.

Anahtar Kelimeler: