The Translation of Allusions and Allusive Wordplay in the Episode Titles of the Series Sex and the City

Abstract

Allusions are references to different types of existing material, sometimes referred to as preformed material. These references may create connotations and “hidden” meanings inside a text which can be deciphered by an audience to gain greater insight for said text. Allusive wordplay includes the modification of this alluded material in some way. This modification can be lexical, grammatical, situational, or it may include some more specific exploitation of linguistic structures such as homophony, homonymy or paronymy. The translation of this phenomenon may create challenges for translators. Therefore, it is important to analyse what kinds of strategies are often used when faced with this problem. The purpose of this thesis is to gain insight into the types of strategies used for translating the episode titles of Sex and the City which frequently utilise allusions and, more specifically, allusive wordplay. The data consists of 57 episode titles. There are six categories consisting of different types of preformed material and one group consisting of ambiguous references. In a decreasing order, according to the number of instances, these categories are fixed expressions, films and tv series, books, songs and nursery rhymes, historical or political events, ambiguous ones, and biblical. The data is also categorised into six categories of different types of wordplay which are lexical modification, situational modification, grammatical modification, homophony, paronymy, and homonymy. The multiple different kinds of material being alluded to in the original episode titles and the different forms of wordplay they include may create issues for translation. The results show that the translations have included the use of six different strategies. Literal and minimum change translation as well as standard translation are each used 16 times. Replacement of the allusion in the source text with material more known in the target culture is used for 12 translations. Reduction to sense by rephrasal is utilised in seven translations. Lastly, re-creating and omission of the allusion each happen in three translations. 28 of the translated episode titles include some allusion while 29 do not include any. Some of the translations that include allusive wordplay were found to have changed their form of wordplay in the process of translation. Based on these findings, it is possible to state that literal and minimum change translation accompanied by standard translation were the most used strategies in the data. The results also indicate that there was awareness of allusion being included in the English episode titles, and an attempt to retain those in the Finnish translations, even though less than half of the translated titles include allusion.