Spanish translation of Pa pa pa: a study on the solution for Spanish translation of wordplays in Mandarin Chinese

Abstract

Pa pa pa is a 1980s Chinese novella. It is a work belonging to China’s “root-seeking literature”, which looks into society’s hopeless collapse and chaos. Its author, Han Shaogong, expresses ideas through his imagination and a colloquial language close to readers and full of wordplays/ puns. This study aims to investigate the mechanisms of wordplay, the translation techniques adopted and whether the translation keeps the original function of wordplay in the source-language text. As the basis of the definition and categories for the wordplay we used Delabastita (1996) and Hsu (2013), and we also consulted Marco (2010), Wang (2012) and Xu (2013) for contrast; we also used Hurtado Albir’s (2013) translation techniques for analysis.