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Focusing on the dilemma of a literary translator between semantic faithfulness to the source text(ST) and creative intervention, this paper studies wordplays in Children's Classic Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. There is no better field than translation of wordplays to deal with the issue of creativity in literary translation, as the only way to be faithful to the intention of the original text is paradoxically to be unfaithful to its exact use of words(Delabastita 1996: 135). Translators of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland are required to decide to what extent they should intervene to deliver the intention of the ST author as wordplays are significant literary devices in the ST at the same time, as translators of a children's literature, they need to consider readability of the target language(TL) readers.
Wordplays discussed in this paper are homophones, homographs, homonyms, parodical puns and puns of words with contrasting meanings. 8 target texts analyzed in this study showed two major types of translation techniques: 1) create new wordplays in the TL, and 2) translate the original wordplays and explain by footnotes or in parenthesis. Three translators created their own wordplays while 5 other translators systematically translated the original wordplays with its meaning and form intact. The analysis shows even in the translation between languages with such big linguistic and cultural differences as in the English-Korean translation, it is possible to deliver the poetic, witty, and humorous effects of the original by creating new wordplays.