Ironic Clues in Translating Verbal Irony: The Case of The Importance of Being Earnest in Macedonian

Abstract

Translating irony is unquestionably one of the major challenges of translators. It subsumes detecting irony in the source text, and, then, 'transporting' it in the target text without marring the effects it is bound to have on the readership. Undertaking such an arduous task, translators need to be equipped primarily with excellent linguistic knowledge, but they also need to have a firm grasp of the various social, political, historical and cultural aspects of both the source and target text. In that respect, the ironic clues whose sole purpose is to subtly signal the ironic nature of a particular statement, are translators' principal 'allies' in the process of recognizing irony in the source text. The ironic clues appear in many different forms ranging from lexical and syntactic to stylistic clues. The question this research proposes to put in the foreground is whether translators remain 'loyal' to their 'allies' and preserve them in the target text. The insights presented in this study are drawn on the analysis of the ironic utterances found in Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and its Macedonian translation, Vazno da si Bogumil, by Dragi Mihajlovski. The results show that with regard to the overall distribution of ironic cues types, there are no major differences between source and target, whereas among the strategies used, there is no discerningly dominant strategy.