METM25 presentation

Keeping the reader laughing: translating puns and wordplay

Rachel Ward, Wymondham, Norfolk, UK

Wordplay features in a wide range of fields – from fiction and comics to advertising and copywriting – and can pop up even in the most unlikely of academic texts. In this interactive session, we will explore some of the strategies translators can use to tackle puns and humorous writing, to keep the reader laughing in the same (or similar) places as the reader of the source text.

This will be a very practical and hands-on session. After a brief consideration of how puns work and where we might find them, participants will work in small groups to tackle exercises from two particular genres where we might encounter puns – children’s books and crime fiction – with examples from Zippel: The Little Keyhole Ghost by Alex Rühle (illustrated by Axel Scheffler, Andersen Press, 2019) and Hotel Cartagena by Simone Buchholz (Orenda Books, 2021). There will be an opportunity to see the solutions that were used in the published translations of these books, but these are far from being the “right” answers, or the only possible approaches.

While the examples are taken from German-to-English translations, the source text quotations are fully glossed, meaning that no knowledge of German is required. Participants may also wish to bring examples from their own work, so that the same problem-solving and lateral-thinking approaches can be applied and used as a basis for discussion, again in small groups or pairs. I will conclude the session by presenting a number of useful resources in this area.
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About the presenter

Rachel Ward is a freelance literary and creative translator from German and French to English, based in Norfolk, UK. She specialises in children’s and young adult literature as well as crime fiction and other contemporary literature. Her non-fiction interests include history, politics, art, journalism and travel.