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Humour in Self-Translation
Edited by Margherita Dore
[Topics in Humor Research 11] 2022
► pp. 41–62

Chapter 3
Punning herself

Nancy Huston’s puns in two self-translated novels

ORCID logo | Universidad de León
Plays on words, humorous or not, pose serious challenges to the translator, as Dirk Delabastita (1997), among many others, has stated. Self-translators know the intended communicative effect behind the puns, giving them a privileged perspective regarding their translation. This is the case with author Nancy Huston, born in 1953 in Alberta, Canada, and residing permanently in France since 1973. She started using self-translation consistently after discovering she could thereby improve her work, which regularly includes wordplays.
This work looks at puns from two of her earlier self-translated novels, comparing Huston’s English and French version to see how she deals with the complexity they entail. Following Delabastita’s typology of puns (1996: 128, 2014: 604), Huston’s puns are both vertical and horizontal wordplay, display paronymy and homophony as well as many more aspects. This chapter comments on cases of pun-to-pun translation, pun-to-alliteration, pun-to-no pun, etc. Huston herself claims she desires the two versions to be as alike as possible (Mi-Kung YI, 2001), and this article aims at confirming this.
Keywords: self-translation, wordplay, methods of translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.A short biography of Nancy Huston
  • 3.Humor in translation
    • 3.1Priorities and restrictions
    • 3.2General theory of verbal humor (GTVH)
  • 4.The pun in translation
  • 5.Huston’s wordplays in translation
    • 5.1Pun to Pun
    • 5.2Pun to Non-pun
    • 5.3Zero pun to Pun
    • 5.4Pun to Other rhetorical device
    • 5.5Other rhetorical device to Pun
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Original Works by Nancy Huston
  • Works cited
  • References
Published online: 13 October 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/thr.11.03ric
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Original Works by Nancy Huston
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. (1993). Cantique des plaines. Montreal: Lemeac; Arles: Actes Sud.Google Scholar
. (1994). La virevolte. Montreal: Lemeac; Arles: Actes Sud.Google Scholar
. (1996). Slow Emergencies. Toronto: Little Brown.Google Scholar
Works cited
Huston, Nancy. (1998). Cantique des plaines. Paris: Editions J’ai lu.Google Scholar
. (2002). Plainsong. South Royalton, Vermont: Steerforth Press L.C.Google Scholar
. (2002b). Slow Emergencies. New York: Vintage International.Google Scholar
. (2008). La virevolte. Paris: Editions J’ai lu.Google Scholar
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