Strategies used by Mati Soomre in translating Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark

Abstract

Lewis Carroll’s work is exceptionally rich for its use of various literary techniques, which, coincidentally, makes it very hard to translate. As Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is his most famous story, research done on its translation is plentiful already, but The Hunting of the Snark, an epic nonsense poem, has been relatively disregarded. The aim of this thesis is to study translation strategies used by Mati Soomre, especially when translating instances of wordplay and neologisms or portmanteau words in Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark into Estonian (‘Snargijaht’). My goal is to provide an additional, original viewpoint to help understand Carroll's texts better.