24
Mar
10

Alice in Many Tongues

Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland by Warren Weaver.

Published by the University of Wisconsin Press, 1964.

Hardback first edition with dust jacket.

Warren Weaver was a civil engineer and mathematician who studied at the University of Wisconsin. He was a pioneer of machine translation.

There is a history of translations of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, and a bibliography at the back of all the foreign editions that Weaver was able to locate.

My favorite part is the chapter “How can Alice be Translated” which looks at the ‘quality’ of the a few versions by examining the way the nonsense, puns and logical jokes in the Mad Hatter’s Tea-Party are handled. I’ve always wondered how translations ‘work’, so that bit is really fascinating. Some translations handle things rather better than others…

There are some pictures of some of the versions: including Hebrew, Swedish, Swahili, Bengali and Thai.

Bought in the bookshop on Curzon Street with the Nancy Mitford blue plaque.

There’s a reprint available on amazon: Alice in Many Tongues: The Translations of Alice in Wonderland

Advertisement

1 Response to “Alice in Many Tongues”


  1. 1 Luca
    May 25, 2012 at 7:14 pm

    Wow, lucky you! I’m from Hungary, and as far as I know it, there’s only one copy of this book in the country, that in our national library. How I wish for a copy to own!! This is such a valuable book…


Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s


Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 84 other subscribers
March 2010
M T W T F S S
1234567
891011121314
15161718192021
22232425262728
293031  
{lang: 'en-GB'}

Flickr Photos

Powered by WebRing.
This site is a member of WebRing.
To browse visit Here.
free counters

%d bloggers like this: