Lexical creativity and humor in translation: On Rabelais’ linguistic genius and the difficulties in translating his works

Abstract

This article focuses on lexical creativity and humor in François Rabelais’ Pantagruel and Gargantua and their translations into English and Hungarian. The theoretical section explores and defines the linguistic concept of “lexical creativity” and Koller’s notion of “equivalence” in translation theory. In the analysis, lexical creations are categorized according to levels of linguistic analysis involved in their production. A systematic contrastive approach is then applied to their translations in order to evaluate the translators’ strategies to render creativity and humor in their respective target languages.

Keywords

• lexical creativity
• typology
• equivalence
• literary translation
• Rabelais
• humor