English Abstract
One major challenge in literary translation is dealing with puns. Puns can create meaningful associations between words that share a similar form but have different meaning, making their translation especially difficult across languages and cultures. The study investigated how various types of pun in the eighth chapter of the Gulistan of Saʿdi are translated into English and Balochi, aiming to identify the types of puns used and assess their representation in the translations, and to determine the most and least frequently used translation procedures for each pun type. The corpus included 63 puns categorized into eight classical Persian types (Laheq, Zayed, Mozare, Taam, Eshteghaq, Motewaj, Mozayel, Ghalb-e Baʿz), drawn from three English translations (Eastwick, anderson, Rezvani) and one Balochi translation (Yousuf Anis). The analysis applied Delabastita’s (1993) model of pun-translation procedures. Findings revealed that English translators overwhelmingly favored “Pun to Non-Pun,” often prioritizing semantic clarity over rhetorical effect, with only Eastwick preserving one pun and anderson omitting one. In contrast, the Balochi translation preserved 12 puns through “Pun to Pun” strategies, suggesting that linguistic proximity between Persian and Balochi facilitates better retention of rhetorical devices. Laheq emerged as the most common and relatively easier pun type to translate, while Eshteghaq, Motewaj, Mozayel, and Ghalb-e Baʿz were the least preserved due to their structural complexity. It could be concluded that stylistic loss in pun translation is often inevitable, particularly when the target language is structurally distant. However, the Balochi version demonstrated that creativity and cultural closeness can improve pun preservation. This research highlighted the importance of linguistic and rhetorical awareness in translating classical literature and offered practical insights for translators and educators. Future studies are encouraged to expand the scope to other rhetorical devices, literary works, or even machine translation systems, to explore how puns and other literary devices can be handled in diverse translation contexts.
