Translating Conversational Implicature in Literary Texts from English into Kurdish: Puns and Humors in Focus

The present study aims to explore the translation strategies employed in the translation of conversational implicatures (with an eye on humor and puns) of two Kurdish translations of Shakespeare’s well-known comedies As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In that view, 224 conversational implicatures were selected randomly in order to explore strategies employed by the translator in rendering conversational implicatures with an eye on humors and puns in these two plays. The data was collected by carefully studying Shakespeare’s plays As You Like It and A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream along with their Kurdish translations done by Azad Hama Sharif. Having identifying the conversational implicature in the source text, their equivalents were subsequently found along with the Kurdish translation. In the third step, the conversational implicature were categorized based on Mur Duenas’s (2003) taxonomy of translation strategies. The analysis revealed that cultural literal translation with 119 cases was the most frequent strategy employed by the translator to render humor and pun conversational implicatures. Moreover, the study identified TL cultural cognate (63 cases), and TL cultural reference suppression (34) to be the most frequent strategies. The study also observed that the translator scarcely employed other two strategies namely ‘SL cultural and linguistic borrowing, SL cultural borrowing plus explanation’ (8 cases) due to the fact that he made every attempt at his disposal to render these conversational implicatures into Kurdish and to create the same effects in the Kurdish audience. The conclusions drawn from this study are significant since it can contribute greatly to the instruction of dramatic texts in Kurdish and other language pairs. The conclusions drawn from this study can be worthwhile for scholars, teachers, and translators working in the area of literary translation and the translation of dramatic texts.