Caught in the Frame

Abstract

Allusive wordplay - stretches of preformed linguistic material (or frames) that have undergone lexical, grammatical, or situational modification - is so culture-specific that it is not only hard for translators working from a foreign language to translate but easy for them to miss altogether. This paper discusses examples of allusive wordplay in English fiction and journalism and reports on an experiment designed to investigate the recognition of frames and carried out on twenty-one Finnish university students of English. Student translations of some of the examples are also discussed. It is argued that a translator who wants to produce a coherent target text and to avoid ‘culture bumps’ (Archer 1986) must above all pay attention to the function of the wordplay in the relevant context. Passages that include modified frames will often need to be rewritten, as attempts to evoke source-culture frames are unlikely to work with target-culture readers to whom such frames are unfamiliar. Target-culture frames, on the other hand, may be puzzling in a text which is set in the source-culture context.

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