Lexical Processing Strategies in the Translation of Neologisms in “Jabberwocky”

Abstract

This article analyzes the translation strategies of literary neologisms, in particular the so-called portmanteaux words of Lewis Carroll’s poem “Jabberwocky” in the work Alice Through the Looking Glass. In the theoretical framework, it starts with an overview of the translations of the poem into Spanish, followed by an approach to the key concepts and definitions of “translation strategies”, with emphasis on Campos (1967, 1991, 2009) and Muñoz Martín (2000). Next, linguistic cognitivism perspectives are provided on the processing of composite units (Leminen et al. 2019), derivatives (Duñabeitia, Perea and Carreiras 2008), and morphological segmentation in the process of opaque or unknown units. By taking up the comparative analysis of Orero (2002, 2007) and López Guix (2017) on the solutions given by twelve translations, the translation strategies used for literary neologisms are deepened and compared with those that occur in the comprehension and lexical processing of texts, finding remarkable similarities as a result. Finally, we propose to systematize these translation strategies. The stylistic, lexical and morphological selections of the translators manifest their reading capacity and their translation styles. The idiosyncrasy of the poem addressed, due to the heterogeneous nature of its neologisms, requires us to contemplate new variables.