TRANSLATING NONSENSE IN DR.SEUSS’S CHILDREN BOOKS =

Abstract

ABSTRACT Literature is always a challenging genre for translators as there are a huge number of expressions in source language that are hard to find their equivalents in target language. “Nonsense literature” which includes words or expressions that often do not have meaning in source language is even stranger and perhaps, more challenging for translators to cope with. Since there has been little research on translating nonsense of the English-Vietnamese language pair, this research was carried out aiming to identify translation strategies that Vietnamese translators used to deal with this problem, specifically literary nonsense at word level. Two children’s books written by Dr. Seuss in English which are There’s a Wocket in my Pocket and I can lick 30 Tigers today! and other stories and their Vietnamese translation works namely Trong túi có cậu Tóc búi and Tớ có thể hạ gục 30 cậu hổ hôm nay! và những câu chuyện khác, respectively were chosen as the case studies for this research. Data was collected by reading and comparing the original works and translated versions and then was categorized based on a combined framework from three frameworks proposed by Baker (1992), Newmark (1988) and Lefevere (1975) for further analysis. The findings indicated that there are four types of nonsense words and the translators applied 8 different translation strategies to translate nonsense items in the two books. The two most common used strategies were Rhymed translation in There is a Wocket in my Pocket and Couplet in I can lick 30 Tigers today! and other stories. These findings suggest that translation strategies were determined based on ways of word formation and the translators’ creativity.