Humour and translation

Translating Humor across Cultures: Verbal Humor in Animated Films

Laura- Karolina Gáll

Partium Christian University, Oradea

Humour and translation

Humour plays an important role in the context of intercultural communication. One of the means for exporting humor across cultures is television. This predominant medium of mass entertainment features a diversity of programs, mainly of Anglo-American origins, in which humour plays a minor, or major role.

Partly universal, partly individual, and at the same time rooted in a specific cultural and linguistic context, humour poses a real challenge for translators. When translating humour a number of factors need to be taken into consideration. Besides having to decide whether the target language reader understands the humour, translators also have to render the humour-inducing effect of the source text. They have to make source humour function as humour in the target culture. Translators’ ability to make creative decisions is often tested by culturally bound elements and language-specific devices.

Verbally expressed humor is among the most difficult to translate. As opposed to referential humour, verbal humour is often viewed as untranslatable due to its language dependent quality. Translators are often faced with the seemingly impossible task of translating verbal humor while keeping as much as possible of its informational and pragmatic content and, at the same time, producing a similar effect as it would provoke in the source language culture. Raphaelson-West (130) illustrates the difficulty that lies at the basis of translating verbal humor relying on the following pun: “Linguistic jokes are punny as hell.” She argues that "In order to translate the joke it would be necessary to have an idiomatic expression about humour which contained a word which rhymed with a word which means something about puns or language. This word which means something linguistic would have to be similar to the word it rhymes with, and its presence would have to add a little meaning to the sentence." It is highly unlikely, however, for languages to comply with such a number of conditions. Consequently, the good quality of the translation depends largely on the creativity of translators.

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