Translating Rabelais: how wordplay crosses five languages

This article examines how phraseological units from Chapter XI of Rabelais's Gargantua were translated into Polish, BCMS, Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese. The study highlights a key challenge: many units carry both literal and figurative meanings, and translators sometimes prioritized one reading over the other. Using a theoretical look at the units' features and unfrozenness, the author applies a classification of translation techniques to analyze choices made in each language. The analysis shows a range of adaptation strategies and notes an additional technique of creative phraseological innovation, where translators reproduce Rabelaisian wordplay freely within their own cultural frameworks.

What the study examined

The article investigates how a set of phraseological units from Chapter XI of Gargantua by François Rabelais function in translation into five target languages: Polish, Bosnian-Croatian-Montenegrin-Serbian (BCMS), Chinese, Japanese, and Brazilian Portuguese. The selected units combine literal and figurative meanings, which creates a specific translation challenge.

The author begins with a theoretical overview of these units, focusing on their characteristics and their degree of unfrozenness — that is, how much their form and meaning can vary without losing identity. This groundwork frames the later comparative analysis of published translations.

Key findings

• The primary difficulty identified is the dual reading of many units: they function at once as concrete images and as figurative, idiomatic expressions. Translators frequently faced a choice between preserving the literal image or the figurative sense, and that choice often led to sacrificing the other layer.
• Applying Hejwowski’s 2015 classification of translation techniques, adapted for this work, made it possible to categorize the different procedures used across the five languages. The paper documents a variety of strategies that range from close literal rendering to broad semantic adaptation.
• An additional technique emerged in the analysis: phraseological innovation by translators. In these cases, the playful, word-based effects of Rabelais are recreated in a very free and creative way that aligns the text with the cultural universe of the target language rather than reproducing form or meaning exactly.
• The study evaluates how these choices affected the transmission of Rabelaisian wordplay, showing that adaptation often reflects cultural and linguistic priorities in each translation tradition.

Why it matters

The findings shed light on a recurring dilemma in translating texts rich in wordplay and layered meaning: literal and figurative dimensions can pull translators in different directions. Mapping the techniques used offers a clearer picture of how translators manage that tension.

Highlighting translator innovation emphasizes that translation can be an act of creative authorship, not merely substitution. Documenting these varied strategies contributes to broader discussions about translating complex, playful language across disparate linguistic and cultural contexts.