WORDPLAY IN DICKENS’S NOVELS AND WAYS OF THEIR TRANSLATION
The article deals with the general problem of wordplay and its translation. The relevance of the problem is accounted for by the powerful role of wordplay or puns in creating in special artistic atmosphere of any belle-letter sample and difficulties in its translating. The novels by Ch. Dickens have drawn attention of hundreds, if not thousands, researchers. A greater part of them pays attention to the literary side; the papers dealing with his language are quite versatile as well. But we have not yet met the comprehensive description and classification of Dickens’s puns. The aim of our paper is to classify cases of wordplay in the novels by Ch. Dickens and some possible ways of their translation. To achieve this aim we solved the following tasks: a) to choose a reliable definition of wordplay, or pun; b) to create a set of examples taken from Dickens’ novels and their translation into Russian and Ukrainian which are available at the site Gutenberg Project (https://www.gutenberg.org); c) to classify the puns; d) to analyze ways of their translation. The translation of puns is a really great problem and there exist different ways of solving it. Having analyzed Dickens’ puns and wordplay we can summarize that these ones can be subdivided into personal and common; alphabetical, morphemic and word; homonymic, patronymic and polysemantic. The correlation between puns in the original and translation can be described as their direct relation (pun – pun), asymmetric relation (pun – no pun; no pun – pun) and extralinguistic additions. The prospects of our investigation are connected with the study of Dickens’ art of creating individual manner of speech.