Towards A Model Of Translation Of English Puns From The Perspective Of Homophone-switching

The translation of English pun is so difficult that it has long been considered untranslatable in the field of translation. There are many puns in Alice in Wonderland and they have been dealt with in different ways in various translations. which thus, updates our thought of the untranslatability of English puns.How to translate English puns into Chinese? In order to answer this question, the present thesis will take five classic renderings of Alice in Wonderland as examples and collect all the English puns in the work and their translations in five renderings to comparatively study those translations of puns. Inspirited by Nida’s Functional Equivalence theory, the penman finds that on one hand, puns can be understood in the category of homophone-switching:on the other hand, homophone-switching may provide some enlightenment to the translation of English puns.In the frame of "homophone-switching", puns can be divided into two types. namely:static puns and dynamic punning. The former, in fact, means the traditional rhetoric pun. The latter refers to this kind of language phenomenon that the addressee takes advantage of the sounds of some specific parts of the words from the addresser so as to leap to some other language fragments. The switch of the sounds usually results in the shift of the context. Based on "homophone-switching", the present thesis holds the opinion that dynamic punning can be adopted in translation of English puns into Chinese. In the process of translating English puns with dynamic punning, it is not necessary to confine to the original pun word and some adjustments can be made to meet the requirement of the effect in function.