Jenni Lukac (X) Mar 13, 2013:

To continue a long story...
"fresco" was the word the translator chose for "cad" in the text. However, he added a footnote to explain the impossibility of maintaining the wordplay in Spanish.
This is one option. If footnotes are are of the question in your case, I suggest you just find a good Chinese word that expresses a very agressive way of selling an idea to others. Good luck!

Jenni Lukac (X) Mar 13, 2013:

When I read Vikram Seth's "A Suitable Boy" in Spanish, I noticed that the translator had done an interesting thing: he inserted a footnote explaining a play of words that just didn't work in Spanish. In the novel, some girls refer to boys at the university as "cads." According to Webster's Dictionary, a cad is "a man who acts with deliberate disregard for another's feelings or rights". The dictionary provides two examples: He is a cad, not a gentleman.
and He's the type of cad who readily bad-mouths every girl who's ever dumped him.
Seth wanted to play with the idea that this type of men can also be very tempting, just like chocolate, so he made a wordplay using the concept of cad and the brand name of a popular chocolate - Cadbury's. However "cad" isn't a word in Spanish, which gave the Spanish translator a problem. He solved it this way (my inverse translation of the Spanish): in the text -
In the argot of the female students at the University of Brahmpur, a good-looking boy was a "fresco". The expression came from the brandname for chocolate, Cadbury. footnote - To understand this joke, you need to know that what Malati says (in English) is cad, which means shameless, impudent.