Translation of Irony

Verbal irony is a common phenomenon in communication, but its convoluted nature makes it difficult to translate. This book expands on previous studies of the translation of irony by examining the mechanisms of verbal irony in its translation from Catalan and Spanish into English. It accentuates the importance of ironic cues not only in processing irony but also in rendering it across cultures. It also interrogates its translatability in the narratives of two Latin American authors, Julio Cortázar and Juan José Arreola, and two Catalan writers, Pere Calders and Quim Monzó. Comparative analyses of the source and target texts further reveal obstacles in the cross-cultural communication of irony. Based on a proposed classification of ironic cues, this book provides guidelines for the effective translation of irony. The corpus, which is subject to an interdisciplinary analysis rooted in Discourse Stylistics, comprises a compelling range of short stories that tacitly bespeak the authors’ stances towards twentieth-century sociohistorical events as well as more general contemporary issues. The connection between Calders’s and Cortazar’s exiles and their ironic styles is equally explored.

Alícia Moreno Giménez is Lecturer in Hispanic Studies at the University of Central Lancashire and a tutor in Spanish at Edge Hill University. She holds a PhD in Linguistics from Lancaster University (2007), an MA in Advanced Translation Studies from the University of Salford (1999) and a BA in English Language and Literature with German from the University of Barcelona (1996). Her research centres on translation studies, verbal irony and exile, concentrating on the works of Pere Calders and Julio Cortázar. She has delivered and published papers on the ironic short stories of Pere Calders. She is currently working on a collaborative project entitled Objects in Transit(ion), which is based at UCLan and aims to build an interdisciplinary network that draws on methodologies rooted in material culture to explore themes related to global mobility, identity, home, belonging and marginalization. She is a member of the Migration, Diaspora and Exile research center at the University of Central Lancashire.