Dear All,
Time to lighten up a bit, and if we are going to talk about translating humour, then I suppose we should start with some. Sit back and enjoy for a moment. None of the items below is merely a joke - you might recognise a little bit of your own reality in each of them:
The manager of a large city zoo was drafting a letter to order a pair of animals. He sat at his computer and typed the following sentence: “I would like to place an order for two mongooses, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
He stared at the screen, focusing on that odd word mongooses. Then he deleted the word and added another, so that the sentence now read: “I would like to place an order for two mongeese, to be delivered at your earliest convenience.”
Again he stared at the screen, this time focusing on the new word, which seemed just as odd as the original one. Finally, he deleted the whole sentence and started all over. “Everyone knows no full-stocked zoo should be without a mongoose,” he typed. “Please send us two of them.”
Yes, a good writer, let alone a translator, often has to rephrase things to get it right.
A linguistics professor was lecturing his class the other day. “In English,” he said, “a double negative forms a positive. However, in some languages, such as Russian, a double negative remains a negative. But there isn’t a single language, not one, in which a double positive can express a negative.”
A voice from the back of the room retorted, “Yeah, right.”
Maybe there are no absolute absolutes about language!
Two highway workers were busy working at a construction site when a big car with diplomatic licence plates pulled up.
“Parlez-vous français?” the driver asked them. The two workers just stared.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” The two continued to stare at him.
“Fala português?” Neither worker said anything.
“Parlate Italiano?” Still no response.
Finally, the man drives off in disgust.
One worker turned to the other and said, “Gee, maybe we should learn a foreign language…”
“What for? That guy knew four of them and what good did it do him?”
Has that happened to you? It has to me on two occasions, once in Switzerland, and once in France, so my German and French pronunciation must have been terrible... and I didn't have diplomatic licence plates!
A mouse is in his mouse hole and he wants to go out to get something to eat, but he’s afraid there might be a big cat outside, so he puts his ear by the opening and all he hears is “Bow Wow” so he thinks, “Well, there can’t be a cat out there because there’s a big old dog”, so he goes out of his mouse hole and is promptly caught and eaten by a cat, who licks his lips and says “It’s good to be bilingual!!”
And it's true! Being bilingual has many advantages, some of them surprising at times.
Two translators on a ship are talking.
“Can you swim?” asks one.
“No” says the other, “but I can shout for help in nine languages.”
But it's also true that you need other skills as well as language!
We all know that translation involves loss, even despite our trying to be faithful to the original. Humour is almost certainly one of the areas of loss, because it is so subjective and culturally bound. But look at it another way: humour aims to create an effect... to get people to laugh. We may not be able to exactly reproduce the joke, the wordplay, the pun in our target language, but with a bit of practice we can still get our readers, our listeners to laugh! So could we then claim to have successfully translated humour? Think about it. Only last week I watched from a distance (of thousands of kilometres!) as Fr Mosese Vitolio Tui SDB was ordained archbishop of Samoa. Mosese spoke in a mixture of Samoan and English after the ceremony, and even if you understood no words of Samoan, you would have joined in the thousands who attended the ceremony and were almost literally rolling in the aisles as he spoke. He can be a very funny man, and Samoa is in for some humorous times. Listening to him, and watching his face as he spoke, made me realise that humour somehow transcends any particular language.
Meanwhile, read the Best Practice for some further thoughts on the matter.