Two Estonian Alices: comparing the translations of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland

Abstract

Alice in Wonderland is a book that many people around the world know and love. A great deal of research has been done about the translation difficulties of Alice in Wonderland, however, not much research has been done about translating the book into Estonian. This thesis compares two Estonian translations of the book, one translated by Linda Bakis and published in 1940 and the other by Jaan Kross, published in 1971. The thesis analyses the translation of proper nouns, wordplay and puns in Alice in Wonderland. Wordplay is notoriously difficult to translate and the analysis reveals how the Estonian translators have solved the translation issues of wordplay and puns in this book. The analysis also reveals the level of domestication and foreignization in these two translations and enables us to compare the authors’s style from that perspective.