This study will attempt to answer the question of how the phenomenon of irony, deeply rooted in both language and culture, lets itself be translated. The starting point is formed on a theoretical level: the translatability of irony is determined from a translator's point of view, and a theoretical framework is built for irony based on its term history, various literary genera, forms, and linguistic and stylistic characteristics. This frame should both define and limit the researched subject. In the following corpus study, irony's linguistic realization possibilities are extracted first from the work in its original language and then from the translated version. The comparison of the texts shows that the target texts are much less ironic than the source texts. The analysis of the applied translation praxis and the translation conventions shows that the loss of irony through translation does not lie in the structure of the irony, but is the result of the applied translation strategies. In the end, the irony markers are classified according to their translatability and depict possibilities to translate them with functional standpoints. Hence a guide emerges from translated irony to ironic translations. |