“Bother! Said Pooh… “What’s that bit of paper doing?”

He took it out and looked at it. “It’s a missage,” he said to himself, “that’s what it is.”

The contaminated word missage is coined by Winnie-the-Pooh from the noun message and the verb to miss. Boris Zakhoder, when translating the story, substituted the verb by the one that is assonant to the noun послание -–спасти. What has come of it is this:

Он вытащил бумажку и посмотрел на нее.

- Это Спаслание, - сказал он, - вот что это такое.

This pun principle may involve not only words, but also phrases. Mock Turtle, a character from Alice in Wonderland by L. Carroll, reminisces about his school teacher: We called him Tortoise because he taught us. Demurova makes a play with the noun, on the one hand, and noun and preposition, on the other: Учителем у нас был старик Черепаха. Мы звали его Спрутом, … потому что он всегда ходил с прутиком.

6. Play on associative meanings. By “corrupting” a word, the author aims at the receptor’s background associations. This metalingual function of the text must be retained in translation. That is why the translator looks for an assonant word, bringing about similar associations on the part of the translation receptor: Reeling and Writhing studied at sea school in Alice in Wonderland is definitely associated with Reading and Writing, difficult subjects of an elementary school. The translators substituted the nouns with verbs according to the context: сначала мы, как полагается, чихали и пищали (associated with читали и писали) (пер. Демуровой); учились чесать и питать (пер. В.Набокова).

In search for a proper means of compensation or substitution, translators are apt to be rather free: Carroll says that at school children studied Mystery, Ancient and Modern (associated with History, Ancient and Modern), Seaography (Geography), Drawling (Drawing). Here the translators seem to be competing with each other as for the number of school subjects and their expressiveness: Demurova’s version of translation: У нас было много всяких предметов: грязнописание, триконометрия, анатомия и физиология. The list of subjects in Orel’s translation is increased: Еще была Болтаника и Уродоведение; …Палкебра и Драконометрия; Водная Речь; Хроматика, Морквология, Свинтаксис; Физия и Хихика. And V. Nabokov compensated the nouns by saying that they studied the following subjects: Лукомория, древняя и новая; арфография (это мы учились на арфе играть)… Затем делали мы гимнастику. Самое трудное было – язвительное наклонение.

So the crucial principle of a pun translator is receptor-centered translation, taking into account the equivalent effect upon the receptor.

§5. Translation of allusions and quotations

Allusions and quotations play a special role in the English culture. No other language in the world has such a great number of quotation dictionaries as English. Allusions and quotations are widely used not in fiction only, but in everyday speech of common people.²⁷⁴To illustrate their own thoughts, people use allusions and quotations and they often play upon them. This makes a translator’s work more difficult – the quotations are generally altered, turned into allusions, and often hardly recognized by a representative of another culture. Many quotations and allusions are derived from Shakespeare, the Bible, classical literature, poetry. For a translated text to be of good quality, the translator and a source text receptor must share background knowledge. No less important is to convey the allusion or quotation to the receptor of the target text.

To translate a quotation or allusion, it is possible to use commentaries, to do explicatory translation: Oh, Mamma, you’re too kind to me! I don’t deserve it/ It’s like heaping coals of fire on my head after the way I’ve gone on. (A.Cronin) – О мама, ты слишком добра ко мне! Я этого не заслужил. Ведь я так себя плохо вел. Твоя доброта жжет мне совесть, как раскаленные уголья. (Пер. А. Кунина) The source of this allusion is the Bible. The dictionary of idioms suggests the following translation, close to the Russian Bible: ‘отплатить добром за зло’. However, the context provided another translated version.

If necessary, the translator mentions the allusion or quotation source: Как говорится в Библии….

It should be kept in mind that biblical allusions and quotations are far less known in Russian culture than in English. Therefore, it is recommended that the translator use a Russian analogue to a biblical quotation rather than a direct quotation, which might be absolutely unfamiliar to a Russian reader, as it occurred with the following extract from Galsworthy: From Condaford the hot airs of election time had cleared away and the succeeding atmosphere was crystallized in the General’s saying:

“Well, those fellows got their deserts.”

“Doesn’t it make you tremble, Dad, to think what these fellows desert will be if they don’t succeed in putting it over now?”

The General smiled.

“Sufficient into the day, Dinny.”

To render the final quotation, a translator used the direct quotation from the Russian Bible, “Довлеет дневи злоба его, Динни”, which is not comprehensible to a common reader. It would be better to substitute the quotation with its proverbial analogue: Всему свое время.

There is one more translation trap. When a source text contains a quotation from the target language, it is essential to be very careful and accurate in translation, consulting dictionaries of quotations, catch phrases, and idioms. For example, in the Russian text, which is to be translated into English, a translator comes across the phrase “быть или не быть”. It is unacceptable to use one’s own translation, like “Shall I be or shall I not be?”, since it is the world famous question of Hamlet “To be or not to be…”