name Ernst and, given the position at the beginning of the title, both meanings would be capitalised. The Asterix comic strip is renowned for its French puns; its translators have found many ingenious English substitutes. Other forms of wordplay, such as spoonerisms and palindromes are equally difficult, and often force hard choices on the translator. For example, take the classic palindrome: "A man, a plan, a canal: Panama". A translator might choose to translate it literally into, say, French – "", if it were used as a caption for a photo of Theodore Roosevelt (the chief instigator of the Canal), and sacrifice the palindrome. But if the text is meant to give an example of a palindrome, they might elect to sacrifice the literal sense and substitute a French palindrome, such as "" ('A boulder swept away the horned animal'). Douglas Hofstadter discusses the problem of translating a palindrome into Chinese, where such wordplay is theoretically impossible, in his book – which is devoted to the issues and problems of translation, with particular emphasis on the translation of poetry. Another example given by Hofstadter is the translation of the poem Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll, with its wealth of neologisms and portmanteau words, into a number of foreign tongues. A notable Irish joke is that it is not possible to translate mañana into Irish as the Irish "don't have a word that conveys that degree of urgency". Iconicity According to Ghil'ad Zuckermann, "Iconicity might be the reason for refraining from translating Hallelujah and Amen in so many languages, as if the sounds of such basic religious notions have to do with their referents themselves – as if by losing the sound, one might lose the meaning. Compare this to the Kabbalistic power of letters, for example in the case of gematria, the method of interpreting the Hebrew Scriptures by interchanging words whose letters have the same numerical value when added. A simple example of gematric power might be the famous proverb (), or lit. "entered wine went out secret", i.e. "wine brings out the truth", in vino veritas. The gematric value of , or wine, is 70 (י=10; י=10; ן=50) and this is also the gematric value of , or secret, (ס=60; ו=6; ד=4). Thus, this sentence, according to many Jews at the time, had to be true." See also Adam Jacot de Boinod Metaphor Terminology Terms with no direct English