The Contrastive Analysis of English Translation of Persian pun (Case Study: Pun Translation in Rumi’s Book- Masnavi)

Wordplay comprises the creative use of language in the form of e.g. rhyme, alliteration, play with grammar, etc. (Schröter 2004:159). An additional type of wordplay is the pun, which is the form of wordplay that will be focused on in this thesis. The pun is a complex and diverse phenomenon, which is evident from the terminological and conceptual inconsistency, and different works and publications on the subject tend to show this matter. The terms ‘pun’ and ‘wordplay’ are in many cases used interchangeably, and in the words of Dirk Delabastita, an influential scholar on the field, ‘there is not even a consensus as to how the term pun should be understood’ (Delabastita 1993:55). The rich cultural connotation behind puns and the distinctive features of pun such as form, meaning, sound create great problem for the translators. To tackle the problem, the present study attempted to apply Delabastita̛s strategies (1996) for translating pun in Rumi’s poems from Persian to English. In order to conduct the study, the puns were extracted and analyzed with the English version translated by Nicholson (2004). The result of the study indicated that four out of eight strategies proposed by Delabastita were applied by Nicholson and pun to non-pun was the most frequently used strategy.

کلیدواژه ها:

poem ، pun ، translation