Language representation in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers: On the translation of ungrammatical idiolect and language-based jokes

Abstract

Xiaolu Guo’s A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers is a novel in which language has a special protagonism. The main character, Z, is a Chinese girl who goes to London to improve her basic English. Her idiolect is thus characterised by a great quantity of linguistic errors of different types. This lack of proficiency in English makes cross-cultural communication really difficult. Therefore, language becomes in this novel not only a characterisation tool, but also an essential aspect of the plot. Moreover, it is also a paramount source of humour, since there is plenty of jokes based, for instance, on puns, many of which derive from Z’s lack of linguistic competence. The main objective of this paper is to analyse language representation in the source text as well as in the Spanish, Italian and French versions of the novel from the perspective of relevance theory. Out of the three versions, the Spanish one reflects the highest interpretive resemblance in this regard, whereas the Italian one occupies the opposite pole of the scale. With regard to the translation of wordplay, the pragmatic scenario is normally maintained in the TT, although there are statistically significant differences between the three versions and across different types of puns.