Chris Riddell’s Goth Girl five-book series (2013-2017) offers young readers a simple, yet gripping
family saga, brilliantly penned in a rather sophisticated literary style and copiously illustrated by the author himself. The first three books in the series (Goth Girl and the Ghost of a Mouse, Goth Girl and the Fete Worse than Death, and Goth Girl and the Wuthering Fright) have been translated into Romanian (2017-2018) by Mihaela Doagă (Corint Junior Publishing House). Of the manifold challenges posed by Riddell’s novels, the present paper will focus on intertextual humour (which goeshand in hand with culinary terms and wordplay) and the way it was dealt with in translation. Another, correlative aspect concerns paratextuality (specifically, translator’s footnotes), tacitly assumed to redress whatever allusion or pun might have been ʻlostʼ in translation. Given that “verbal humour travels badly” (Chiaro, 2010: 1), and intertexts are often diffuse (if not altogether convoluted), our overall conclusion is that the Romanian version under consideration here is as accurate as is linguistically, (inter)culturally, and humanly possible.
Daniela Hăisan
Author
Daniela Hăisan is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and English Language at Ştefan cel Mare University of Suceava, Romania. Her research interests include English morphology, ESP, translated (children’s) literature and discourse analysis. She has published five books and over 60 papers on various topics in translation and morphosyntax.