Wordplay and the Didactics of Translation

AbstractWordplay offers unique opportunities for the teaching of translation. It allows an exploration of semantic mechanisms in both a negative and a positive perspective. Translation errors viewed as interlingual puns are the reverse of deliberate wordplays, showing as they do a misapplied perception of double meanings. There is a disorganized system at work behind them, whose exploration may in a positive sense serve as an initiation to the construction of meaning and the natural patterns of ambiguity inherent in the source and target languages. Moreover, the translation of wordplay involves theory-based choices and so invites both teacher and student to speculate about the dependence of textual choices on one’s concept of translation.