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Humor and translation - An interdiscipline

Article  in  Humor - International Journal of Humor Research · June 2005

DOI: 10.1515/humr.2005.18.2.185

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Humor Volume 18—2 (2005), pages 185-207. Special Issue Humor and
Translation, Guest Editor, Delia Chiaro.
print ISSN 0933-1719/05/0018-0185. Mouton de Gruyter . Berlin . New York.

Humor and translation, an interdiscipline

PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA

Abstract

This paper calls for greater attention from researchers into the nature of humor
translation as an interdisciplinary area that should be of interest to translation
and humor studies. It includes a brief review of the complexity of translation and
the problems posed by traditional approaches. The paper introduces a number of
parameters that may be of assistance in developing joke typologies for translators
or translation scholars. A model is presented for structuring joke-types according
to binary branching. An attempt is then made to combine the model with ideas
and concepts put forward in Attardo (2002). The result is a binary branch tree for
the 6 Knowledge Resources and the hierarchical structure that Attardo claims
they have. One important conclusion is that sameness, or similarity, may have
little to do with funniness, and if this is so it is going to create a dilemma for
translators wishing to achieve equivalent effect.

Keywords: Translation; interdisciplinary; joke-type; variable; mapping, GTVH.

1. Introduction

There is one idea among translation scholars that is hardly disputed at all
nowadays; and it is that translation studies is an interdisciplinary field of research.
So is humor studies; and both draw from linguistics, psychology and sociology,
among other disciplines, for their descriptions and their theoretical models and
constructs. It is not surprising, then, that humor and translation studies overlap,
and the findings of one must be of interest to the other. What is surprising is that
Humor and translation

the link between translation and humor has not received sufficient attention from
scholars in either field, with a handful of honourable exceptions (most recently,
Vandaele 2002). The translatability of humor, how well humor travels across
languages, and the nature of the barriers, these are the kinds of issues that need to
be addressed from both sides of the area where humor and translation overlap.
Translators could benefit immensely from a few useful tips and some practical
advice on how to decode and reconstruct humoristic patterns. In developing their
theories, translation scholars cannot afford to ignore the insights of their
colleagues in humor studies (among others); likewise, I believe that humor studies
can actually gain greater insight into the linguistic, social and psychological
factors of humor, in the search of universals, for example, by resorting to the test
of translation, both experimentally and descriptively. If there is insufficient
dialogue and awareness of progress made in related fields (e.g. humor studies),
certain translation problems and issues can only be addressed by applying
"general" theoretical models and proposals, none of which have even received
widespread consensus from the scholarly community as actually constituting a
general theory of translation. Such is the case of Skopostheorie, a powerful
functionalist theory for translation, as it accounts for a lot, but this does not mean
that it can usurp the contribution of humor studies, or ignore the hard work of its
scholars.

2. The ABC of translatability variables

The reason why translation is so difficult to fathom is because it is about dealing

with contingency, unlike comparative linguistics. While the linguist is interested
in general patterns of similarities and differences between language systems (e.g.
grammaticality, normality), a translator is required to act upon textual items (i.e.
utterances) that often contravene the norm, or to use words or sentences that have
never been used before. Thus, all attempts to pin translation down to a series of
absolute truths have failed. There are so many variables affecting translation that

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Humor and translation

they may not have all been identified yet. In any case, here are the most obvious
ones, the ABC of translation variables, in ten points (a-j).
(a) the language(s)/culture(s) one is translating from (including all aspects of
language variation, such as dialects and registers)
(b) the language(s)/culture(s) one is translating into
(c) the purpose(s) and justification(s) for the existence of the translated version
(d) the nature of the text, including parameters such as textuality, genre, style and
discourse
(e) the intended recipient(s), what they are assumed to be like
(f) the client(s) or translation initiator(s), their needs and demands
(g) the expectation(s) for the translated text and prejudice towards translations
and translators
(h) the translator(s): human (individuals or teams), fully automatic, or computer
assisted
(i) the conditions in which the task is carried out (deadline, materials,
motivation, etc.)
(j) the medium, mode and means of communication: oral, written, audiovisual,
private, mass media, etc.
In turn, each one of these variables can be read in the singular or in the plural, as
not all texts are monolingual, or single-purpose; more than one person may be
responsible for the final product, and so on. The translation of each and every text
item (any segment, form, function, or feature of a text, anything from the smallest
detail to the whole text) is affected by the nature of these variables.
So much variability seems to suggest two complementary procedures that could
be of great benefit to scholar and translator alike. I will call one procedure
“mapping”, i.e. locating and analysing textual items (e.g. instances of humor)
according to relevant classifications (e.g. humor typologies). The other I call
“prioritising”, i.e. establishing what is important for each case (in the context of
translating), and how important each item and aspect is, in order to have clear set
of criteria for shaping the translation in one way rather than another. Translators
and scholars alike have to weigh the relative importance of humor, along with the
importance of a given type of humor, when deciding how to deal with it. A

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Humor and translation

dangerous simplification is to presume that humor will necessarily be equally

important in both the translated version and its source text. Or that the nature of
the humor must be the same in both source text and its translation.
Applied to humor, this means that translators, teachers and researchers of texts
where humor is an ingredient, especially if it is an important one, would benefit
from a “map of humor”, i.e. a series of classifications, definitions, and examples
of instances of humor and humor-types, as well as models and insights like the
ones laid out in the General Theory of Verbal Humor (Attardo & Raskin 1991;
Raskin 1985; and Ruch et al. 1993). The bulk of the cartographic work should
presumably be done by humor scholars and then picked up by translation
researchers and translators, who ultimately must make their own decisions on
whose map to use or whether they might have to draw up their own, hopefully on
the basis of a sound model. Research into humor is done by scholars who have
one foot in at least one other discipline, and this should be exploited to
disseminate their findings from one field to another. The same can be said for
spreading translation theories.

3. Traditional approaches to translation

Before we move forward let’s take a step back and look at what is usually
prioritised in translation. Common sense, and even common practice, tells us that
translation is about being faithful to the words, the meaning, the contents, the
intention, the effect of a text. So the common practice and general rule, when it
comes to translating humor, could be summed up as “translate the words and/or
the contents and then keep your fingers crossed and hope that the humor will
somehow come across with the rest”. To the extent that this formula quite
frequently fails to work, many experts reach the rather hasty conclusion that
humor is untranslatable, although they may differ on the degree or the
circumstances of untranslatability (see Delabastita 1994, for the issue of
translatablity). The translatability of humor could be a vital component of the
common ground shared by translation and humor studies.

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Humor and translation

The fact is that a joke (as an instance of humor, though not the only one, as many
are quick to point out) can be told in lots of different ways, so where does that
leave such a fearful respect for preserving the words? The point of a joke is often
far removed from its semantic value, so where does that leave the importance of
meaning and contents, and what is one to do about non-sense humor? A text
might resort to humor as a means of making the author’s intention clearer or more
effective, but what do we do if humor is detrimental to the author’s goals in the
new environment of the translated version? If, on the other hand, humor is the
goal of the text (as in comedy) or social intercourse (breaking ice, gaining trust,
salesmanship), what is the point in translating the contents if the humor is made to
disappear in the process? What translators need is an awareness of the nature of
humor and its relative importance in different contexts. Nevertheless, our
commitment to humor should not lead us to prioritise it in situations where it may
have to be sacrificed to some extent to allow for a satisfactory rendering of other
textual items that are actually more important.1

4. Joke-types for translation

Humor scholars have produced many classifications for types of humor and types
of jokes. Here, I will simply outline distinctions that are important from the point
of view of the translator. These parameters are proposed to be considered for
“mapping”, when appropriate, i.e. they could be used as “types” (e.g. for figure 1).
Mapping and solution-types are the focus of part 6 of this paper.

• Unrestricted, Inter-/bi-national

Some jokes and types of humor offer very little or no resistance to translation (in a
sense they are unrestricted) when the source and target languages and cultural
systems overlap, when the text users of both communities have the same shared
knowledge, values and tastes that are necessary to appreciate a given instance of
humor in the same way. A translator may not worry so much that a joke might be
considered international, much less universal, as long at it is bi-national, i.e. it can

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Humor and translation

easily cross from the source-text community to the target-text (translation)

community, without any need for adaptation or substitution because of linguistic
or cultural differences; it can be literally translated with no loss of humor, or
content, or meaning.
Example 1
Gobi Desert Canoe Club (English) → Circolo di Canottagio del Deserto del Gobi
(Italian)

This example, borrowed from Attardo (2002), is unrestricted in the sense just
outlined if we consider that the Gobi Desert has exactly the same referential and
connotative values for the intended readers of the English version and the Italian
version, and likewise for canoe clubs, what they are and what they might
represent. In his paper, Attardo reaches the unoriginal conclusion that absolute
translation is impossible; this is an age-old redundancy, since anything, including
translation, upon which impossible conditions are imposed is impossible to
achieve. No translation is completely without restrictions since the very presence
of restrictions is what distinguishes a translation from a photocopy, for example. It
is in the nature of translation for the target text to be different to the source text in
some ways, and similar in others. The complication arises from the fact that the
precise differences and similarities are so variable, often hardly even predictable.
What really matters in jokes like example 1 is that funniness is not restricted by
any (meta)linguistic or cultural-knowledge barrier. For jokes to properly fall into
this category nor would there be any differences in how such a joke as example 1
would be perceived according to the rest of the parameters outlined below.

• Restricted by audience profile traits

Some jokes and types of humor are challenging for the translator due to specific
difficulties (restrictions) that have to do with the text users’ linguistic or
encyclopaedic knowledge, or their degree of familiarity or appreciation for certain
subject-matters, themes, genres, and types of humor. So, a language-restricted, or
linguistic, joke is one that depends on the knowledge of certain features of a given

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Humor and translation

language (e.g. which words are homonymic, paronymic, alliterative or rhyming);

an ethnic joke is one that depends on the knowledge of certain features of a given
ethnic group for its understanding, and an appreciation of a certain brand ethnic
humor for its funniness (this includes a stereotype of the group’s language and
discourse varieties). A joke might be theme-restricted if it deals with a theme that
is not at all common within a given community (e.g. lawyers jokes in Spain),
despite its popularity elsewhere. Likewise for script-restricted humor. Many of
these restrictions fall into the category of “culture bumps”, i.e. culture-specific
items of interpersonal communication and social dynamics. To sum up this
category, here is a list of the main problem areas.
– Semiotic and linguistic differences, including metalinguistic devices
– Knowledge (of social and cultural institutions, themes, genres, etc.)
– Frequency-restricted (rare, marked v. familiar)
– Appreciation (of humor-value of theme, approach, presentation, occasion)
The reason why this category stresses the profile of the audience is because there
are, for instance, no objective linguistic restrictions, only the extent to which the
audience might be ignorant of, or inexperienced in, a given (aspect of) language.
Most people are ignorant of certain aspects or words of their own language, and a
lot of people know certain things about certain foreign languages, sometimes to a
great degree of proficiency and sophistication. So, what must be measured is not
the difference between the languages involved, but the cognitive distance between
the knowledge required to decode a message (i.e. to understand and appreciate a
text) and the knowledge one assumes one’s audience to have. In this sense,
concepts such as “knowledge resources”, which is part of the General Theory of
Verbal Humor, come in very handy. Example 1 may be unrestricted linguistically
speaking, however, the fact that it belongs to T-shirt slogan humor may be
problematic for countries where very few people walk around with funny slogans
on their T-shirts (Spain is one such example). The same could be said for bumper
stickers, as a bi-national difference between Spain and the USA. Example 1 might
be considered untranslatable, not on the basis of any knowledge resource required
for decoding the text, but simply because one might not be able to find a
manufacturer for such T-shirts (or bumper stickers). Internet, on the other hand, is

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Humor and translation

a domain where jokes travel to many different countries, sometimes in one

language, sometimes through translation. So, the mode of discourse and social
occasion are important sociocultural factors to take into account.

• Intentionality

Another important distinction for translators to watch out for is whether or not the
humor is part of the author’s intention or is caused by something else; e.g. text
user seeing things in the text that the author did not —or did not intend to— say,
funny mistakes, like translators’ errors (example 3), or the specific circumstances
in which the source —or the target— text is received, i.e. situational factors,
happy or unfortunate coincidences. Unintended humor by punning and other
means may be a by-product of either the source text or its translation, though by
no means necessarily for the same reasons. As in the previous case, we can see
that interpretation depends as much on what is in a reader, listener or viewer’s
mind as what is on the page, the stage or the screen. Translators are often warned
against unintended punning (example 2), especially for sensitive texts. For
example, Bible translator and theorist, Eugene Nida (1964) shudders at the
thought of Biblical translations that might produce sniggering from the pews, so
he proposes translators use ‘donkey’ rather than ‘ass’.
Example 2
Monsignor to new priest, “When David was hit by a rock and knocked off his
donkey, don’t say he was stoned off his ass.”

Example 3
In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: “Ladies are requested not to have children in the
bar.”

• Improvisation

Humor may be carefully contrived and rehearsed, or may be more spontaneous.

Both kinds of humor can often be very difficult to translate, for different reasons.

8
Humor and translation

Elaborate humor, or humor that is part of an elaborate rhetorical style, is difficult

when one wishes to translate the nuances and innuendo as well as the more
obvious aspects of the text. Spur-of-the moment punning and joking is a typical
nightmare for interpreters because they have no means of backtracking or
foreseeing where the pun is going to fall unless warned some time before the
speaker’s performance, by getting a copy of the speech, for example.

• Signals (of the intention to joke)

Translators, like other text users, may miss certain jokes, either because they
“don’t get it” or because they fail to identify the presence of a joke that has not
been overtly signalled (for joke signals, see Nash 1985). Because of the
difficulties involved in translating humor, the translator may feel the need to turn
covert forms of humor into more overt manifestations, especially if the translation
is less effective than the original, in this case the translator conveys that there has
been attempt at being funny, while acknowledging failure to render the actual
funniness (the problem is that the public usually have no way of knowing whether
such a failure is the translator’s or the source text’s). In any case, this kind of
practice is quite common in translation on the whole, so much so that it has given
rise to the hypothesis that translations have a universal tendency to be more
explicit than their source texts. The down side of this practice occurs when humor
is based, or relies on subtlety, tongue-in-cheek, irony, allusion and other such
covert devices, but the translator resorts to broad brush, bluntness and denotative
meaning to spell everything out to the text user in no uncertain terms, thus
shredding the very fabric of this kind of humor. Sometimes, however, puns might
be designed to be particularly difficult to spot, when the translator (and/or author)
wishes to get around the censor, for instance.

• Private (or in-group) jokes

A typical hindrance to humor appreciation is for the text user to be “left out” of a
private joke, or humor that relies heavily on people belonging to certain groups.

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Humor and translation

The nature and size of such groups covers a whole range of possibilities. Even
people of the same country, village, or school may be “left out”, so foreigners are
much more likely candidates, and the principle still works when the group is a
whole nationality. In the latter case, “private national-group” would overlap with
the category of “restricted by necessary knowledge and appreciation of culturally
bound items”. Smaller groups may be defined by small geographical regions,
certain social classes or professions, interest groups, political parties, minority
groups, and so on. Often such groups are characterised by their sociolect or
dialect, or particular language awareness.

• Wordplay v. Narrative (linguistic v. textual)

Humor may be produced by wordplay, as in puns, one liners, limericks, witticims,

and so on, or by funny situations that gradually unfold or suddenly become
apparent in the narrative or plot. The latter case is not necessarily difficult to
translate, although translators who have their noses too close to the page may not
be able to see the forest (narrative twists and turns) through all the trees (words
and sentences). It is also a good reminder that how we translate a single sentence
or even word does not depend entirely on the word or sentence itself, or even its
immediate surroundings, but may depend on passages that are far removed form
the part of the text we happen to be translating at any given moment.
Compensation both of kind and place must be taken into account when exploring
possible solutions. Compensation of kind involves achieving the same effect by
different means, thus compensating for not using the one appearing in the source
text. Compensation of place refers to the practice of making a certain source-text
item or feature appear in a different place in the translation in order to avoid loss
of meaning, effect, function or intention.

• Target

Usually the most interesting jokes and other instances of humor involve some sort
of victim, or target. Victimless humor tends to be either childlike humor, such as

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Humor and translation

toilet humor, or intellectual games, such as riddles or linguistic awareness

(examples 4 and 5). Victims may be people, individuals or groups, institutions,
ideas, common practices or beliefs, etc. Needless to say all of them may be
perceived differently in different communities and this affects the strategies and
the success of translating victim-related humor. Victimless humor is not usually
any easier to translate because it tends to be metalinguistic, and in-group related.
Finally, all of the mechanisms used to produce victimless humor may also be used
when there is an identifiable victim, so the translator (and any other text user for
that matter) should not be misled by the initial appearance of an instance of
humor.

Example 4
Whose cruel idea was it for the word “lisp” to have an “s” in it?

Whether we consider example 4 to be victimless or otherwise may actually

depend on the routine, or text, it is a part of, and how it is performed or presented.

• Meaning

We have already stressed the importance of meaning in mainstream translation.

Translating humor is complicated by the fact that it often relies on double
meaning, ambiguity, metaphorical meanings, and sometimes not on meaning—in
the traditional sense of the word meaning—but rather on absurdity, surrealism, or
abstract or symbolic meaning. Again none of this is exclusive to humor (which
makes it interesting to translation studies in other areas such as poetry and
advertising jingles).

• Optionality and familiarity (regarding theme, genre, etc.)

Certain instances of humor may be expected so strongly as to be virtually

compulsory. An example of this could be public speeches for special occasions. In
English-speaking countries such occasions are much more numerous and the need

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Humor and translation

to show a sense of humor much more pressing than in other countries. On other
occasions (e.g. a prosecutor seeking the death penalty for the defendant) humor
may be rare, or at least a certain brand of it. One of the translator’s jobs will be to
assess to what degree the presence of humor responds to demands of the genre, or
social occasion, and likewise, what the consequences will be for including or
excluding humor from the translation, regardless/because of its presence/absence
in the source text.

• Taboo (embarrassment, offence, etc.)

Taboo is an instance of a culture-bound factor in the specific nature of each taboo,

although the notion and presence of taboo is universal. Taboo can either be an
external factor or a component of humor. In the first case, I am referring, for
instance, to jokes about aspects of society that are associated to taboo (typically,
bodily functions, sex, religion, politics), or that deal with these subjects in a light-
hearted manner. In the second case, I am referring to occasions when humor itself
is taboo, or certain brand of it. Obviously, the two could appear simultaneously.
The fact that these parameters vary from one community to another forces the
translator to assess the risk involved in rendering certain typs of humor with little
or no change. An example of this can be seen in the variety of laws and
regulations from one country to another that deal with humor on television; what
words can be used, which institutions and groups can be targeted, and so on.

 Metalinguistic humor

By metalinguistic humor we mean that its object is language, and its objective
language awareness. Obviously, translation is nearly always about changing from
one language into another and that tends to pose serious difficulties for finding a
way to translate these jokes. One could almost say that translation itself is a word
game, and rendering metalinguistic humor in another language is a particularly
challenging riddle. Wordplay forms include pun, acrostic, rhyme, anagram,
witticism, etc. It is important not to forget the function of wordplay in case it is

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Humor and translation

more important than form. Wordplay functions include: phatic, image-enhancing;

part of a game, entertainment, educational, mind-teaser, tongue-twister;
mnemonic.
Example 5
I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son;
I’m only plucking pheasants ’till the pheasant plucker comes.

• Verbal and non-verbal combined, or iconic representation of idiom and

metaphor.

A further consideration in translating humor is related to the fact that humor, like
most aspects of human communication, can be produced by verbal or non-verbal
means, or by various combinations of the two (see Hammond and Hughes 1978;
for a study in visual punning). People tend to think of translation as pertaining
exclusively to the verbal domain, but even if this were true for translators they
still often have to compensate for culturally bound meanings that are expressed
non-verbally in the source text and would lead to considerable gaps in the
communication if not accounted for somehow. Comic books, films and television
readily come to mind as illustrations of this challenge. See figure 2 for an example
of how this can be incorporated into a model of humor translation.

• The forms of humor (& contrastive studies)

Translating is to a large degree a decision-making process, and much of this

involves deciding what to do with the form of expression and how it relates to the
author’s underlying intentions and reasons for choosing one form over another.
We also know that form and performance (the packaging and delivery) are key
components of the potential success of humor. Sometimes a change of scenery
(i.e. moving the text to a different country) will require a change of form, but any
strategy has to be carefully thought out since it is easy to change for change sake
with no real gain involved. In talking about form I am referring to rhetorical
devices such as: irony, paradox, contradiction; parody, caricature, imitation;

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Humor and translation

hyperbole, understatement; analogy, simile, metaphor, definition; joke/comic

formulae (structures, codes, patterns, performance-styles).

5. Targets and victims of humor

In a slightly more detailed look at victim-targeting humor, we notice two

important broad categories. At least they are important for the translator, who
might consider that it is worth changing or adapting one or more of the variables
that fall under these categories. One category covers aspects of the victim’s
identity, the other the function and nature of the attack.

• Victim’s identity, human or otherwise

The victim may be the author, or a group the author is perceived as being a
member of, likewise for the text user, or the victim may be a third party individual
or group. On the other hand the victim may not be any particular person but
something associated to human beings: feelings, behaviour, relationships, death,
war, health, education, ideals. Otherwise the victims might be animals, aspects of
the environment, technology, etc. but even these often end up as instruments for
criticizing people who have something to do with these non-human victims. One
cannot be aggressive to a tree, says Attardo (2002), and indeed one cannot offend
a tree. But one can show either a certain degree of madness or anti-tree obsession;
or one might be openly targeting trees, and between the lines be having a dig at
human groups or institutions, environmentalists, local authorities, tree-loving
children (if a comedian reads this and makes a routine out of it I hope to receive
some acknowledgement). In any case, depending on the formulation of the joke, it
may not be totally bizarre to say that the victims of some jokes are trees (or cars,
or the weather, or insects). Identity is important in translation because there are
shifts of perspective very much like the changes that are made when shifting from
direct quoting to reported speech. Differences between source and translation tend
to involve some combination of different people in different places at different
times. For example, if the source has taken its readers as the victims we need to
ask how is this going to work when the readers are no longer the same? British

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Humor and translation

humor (e.g. BBC comedy) about the British simply cannot travel abroad, even in
English, as the same thing entirely; abroad, you have foreigners laughing at the
British, not the British poking fun at their own failings. Either that or you create
an analogical situation of foreigners making the same kind of fun about
themselves in such a way that Britishness is erased from the equation. This tends
to be called adaptation in translation studies.

• Function and nature of the attack

The reasons why a certain victim is chosen or certain kind of victim-related joke
is told must be known to the translator as a basis for deciding whether those
reasons will still hold water for the foreign version. Establishing or strengthening
some kind of relationship between the interlocutors is a possible reason for many
kinds of humor. We might call this tenor defining (bonding, establishing
authority, image-enhancing, etc.).
The humorist might be attempting to produce sympathy or empathy towards the
victim, or on the contrary, use humor as a weapon to make the victim look
somehow unworthy of sympathy, much less empathy. I like to refer to these two
objectives as humanizing v. dehumanizing. When we talk about ethnic humor we
might be referring to jokes that pick out a certain ethnic group as their target or
victim; however the term racist tends to apply to jokes that deliberately set out to
dehumanize a given race or ethnic group, probably to provide support in
constructing negative images of those people and justifying racist or otherwise
discriminatory practices against them. Cartoons and jokes are rife in war and pre-
war situations, and in the more metaphorical battles between rival social groups:
political parties, religious groups, sports clubs, and so on.
When dehumanizing jokes are told —in different circumstances— by their
intended victims it is often the case that irony is involved, and what is actually
going on is a denunciation of such jokes, in a situation where tenor and function
are closely intertwined. Failure to identify irony is a common problem when
translating, precisely because the author claims something that does not portray
his or her actual beliefs or opinions. The likely presence of irony and other

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Humor and translation

potentially confusing signals means that the translator needs to strive to

discriminate whether an instance of humor is attacking or serving a certain item or
aspect of a given community or society (practice, ideology, social status quo,
“common sense”, tradition, etc.).

• Criticism (constructive or otherwise)

Humor is a powerful tool for criticizing because, among other reasons, it tends to
provide ample opportunity to thwart or deflect any angry reactions to it. For
example, one can easily resort to the typical excuse “I was only joking”. Here
again, the translator will have to decide whether humor (or the same brand of
humor) is the most effective way of producing the same kind of criticism, and
before that whether humor is at the service of criticism, or whether the funniness
of joke itself is more important than any criticism it might hold.

Example 6
War doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left.

A type of joke that may overlap with other categories is the one constituted by
mind-teasers and food for thought. Although they may often be without any
victim or criticism, this is not something that can be taken for granted. Here is a
short list of examples of what I am referring to: puzzles, riddles and mysteries;
witticisms; puns and wordplay; rhymes, songs, and other sound patterns;
paradoxes and contradictions; proverbs, rules of thumb, folk wisdom; nonsense,
surrealism. When this type of humor relies on special features of the language it is
formulated in it is usually quite difficult to translate.

6. Binary branching as a form of mapping

A translational model should be adaptable to a wide range of classifications for

jokes. By this I mean that an adaptable translation model, or theory, is preferable
to one that depends too heavily on new trends in neighbouring fields of study, or

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Humor and translation

worse still, that translation scholars should be called upon to resolve different
schools of thought in humor studies, although we have already pointed out that
discoveries in either field will often shed much-needed light on the other, but
specialists should be given some credit for their efforts and insights. The diversity
of typologies may be seen as a hindrance, or may simply respond to the need to
highlight different kinds of relationships among jokes, depending on the occasion.
Because this may in fact be part of the dynamics of a translator’s behaviour it
might be contradictory to try to impose a definitive classification. There is
probably a difference between categorizing jokes for (i) the purpose of
understanding or explaining what a joke is and how it works, more closely related
to “pure” humor studies or for (ii) establishing relationships between a source text
(ST) and its target text (TT), more in line with a translator’s daily bread and
butter. Figure 1(a) is an illustration of an instance of mapping possibilities for
translation according to a binary tree structure (S-set or set of all possible
solutions), where a typology of jokes has yet to be inserted on a particular joke for
the purpose of its translation (problem P). A scholar can often afford to be
cautious when classifying jokes and introduce a certain degree of fuzziness at
some points. Translators cannot afford to go deep into the discussion of what
constitutes funniness, or provide a definition for humor, or even translation for
that matter, since this is work for the scholars. The binary structure, then, does not
aim to do away with scholarly hesitations or fuzziness, but rather attempts to
establish what kind of criteria might guide a translator's hand, what kind of
restrictions are in the way of seamless consistency. If a joke, for instance, can also
be regarded as a non-joke, then a translator will have to decide whether to classify
the item as a joke, as a non-joke, or as a type of joke that may also function
otherwise, or as an ambiguous type of non-joke. This is why the actual labels for
each branch and the number of branches is left completely open, to be established
anew for each case. At the end of the day, the typology is always the translator’s,
however his or her categories might be influenced (and informed) by proposals
from scholars in humor studies, or elsewhere. A translator's typology may actually
be established without full awareness of one's own behaviour, and the translator
might be unable to verbalise his or her criteria. Even then, the scholar will still be

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interested in setting out to find regular patterns of behaviour. Binary branching is

merely proposed as a research tool.
Category [1] covers all of the potential TT solutions that are regarded as still
being essentially the “same” ST joke (for what might theoretically constitute the
same joke see similarity metric in Ruch et al. 1993, in translation practice it
involves deciding on what constitutes the same joke according to the translator).
A solution within [2] would be any instance of the “same type” of joke although
not essentially the same one; this is where differences of criteria among translators
might cause different typologies to be applied. Solution [3] refers to any joke of
any other type. Solution [4] provides that the translation may not render the joke
as a joke, but may compensate for this by resorting to some other device such as
hyperbole or simile. Solution [5] is for any remaining possibilities for translation,
such as stating the author’s intended message in straightforward, plain, blunt
terms, unfunny and non-rhetorical.

Figure 1. Set of solutions S: binary branching tree structure for translating

problem P.

It should be apparent that according to this kind of map, the translator, as well as
the translation researcher, can greatly benefit from typologies that might be
suggested by humor studies and theories, especially for solution-types [1, 2 and
3]. Maybe less apparent, but equally important is the fact that theories of humor

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Humor and translation

should be aware of translational practices regarding their field of interest. Figure

1(b) shows how the diagram of type-within-type options for translation problems
can be made “telescopic”, stretching out to any number ‘n’ of types and subtypes.
Furthermore, 1(b) shows how the diagram may be made more abstract to be used
for analysing translation problems (P) other than jokes and mapping their
solutions according to a binary type-within-type structure. Other translation
problems that can be structured according to various typologies in a similar way
to the one outlined for humor are metaphor, insult, irony, wordplay. Figure 2
shows potential ramifications for verbal and non-verbal solutions, for L2 or other
languages, and for simple or complex solutions. By L2 we mean the language that
is stated as the TT language, L1 being the ST language. Simple solutions (Sº) are
of the type: ST-joke-into-TT-item (textual items as discussed in section 2 above);
or omission of joke. Complex solutions (Sº+X) provide that, for example, the ST-
joke-into-TT-item (joke or whatever) be complemented with something else (X);
this could be a small introduction to provide a few useful hints that the target-text
audience might need, a glossary, a footnote, or whatever.
One aspect that is not visible in this model of binary branching is the strategy of
compensation of place, i.e. moving a joke or an instance of humor to a different
place within its text in order to preserve its effectiveness. This does not mean that
I am not aware of the strategy or its importance, it is rather, that binary branching
is meant to focus on the sum total of all instances of a given feature (humor or
whatever) for a text or text corpus, as a translation problem, to see how that
particular problem is or can be dealt with in a given translation. Thus, if moving a
joke enables it to remain the same in all respects, or at least all relevant respects,
then it will be categorised as the same joke; whereas if moving it, or not moving
it, entails a significant change, then the joke will have to be regarded as of a
different type, or even as a non-joke, as the case may be.

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Humor and translation

Figure 2. verbal, non-verbal, interlingual and simple v. complex binary splits

7. The relative importance of humor v. other priorities

Mapping, i.e. becoming aware of all possible translation solutions and how they
relate to each other, is not enough, however. Once we have a map we need a
direction, and this is provided in translation by ranking needs and objectives
according to a hierarchical set of priorities. A set of priorities for translation is not
something that can be predefined by the theory, it is dependent on the task at
hand, and the restrictions involved in the task. So, when translating humor we
need to know where humor stands as a priority and what restrictions stand in the
way of fulfilling the intended goals (Zabalbeascoa 1996). The complexity of
translation, then, arises from the range of possible combinations of so many
variables. Priorities and restrictions may change considerably from translation to
translation and even between the translation and its source text. Below is a short
list of possibilities for prioritising humor among other textual items. If a certain
feature is perceived as a top priority it must be achieved at all costs, middle range
priorities are highly desirable but share their importance with other textual
features. Marginal priorities are the ones which are only attempted as long as
more important priorities are fully accounted for first. Priorities that are prohibited
should not appear in the text at all, although they may be perfectly legitimate in
other circumstances.
Top: e.g. TV comedy, a joke-story, one-liners, etc.

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Humor and translation

Middle: e.g. happy-ending love/adventure stories, TV quiz shows.

Marginal: e.g. as pedagogical device in school, Shakespeare's tragedies.
Prohibited: e.g. certain moments of high drama, tragedy, horror stories, laws,
and any other inappropriate situations.
Attardo (2002) presents a very interesting and enlightening set of parameters for
analysing verbal humor. It seems highly likely that these parameters, or
knowledge resources, as he calls them, could be applied very meaningfully to the
scheme of mapping as presented here. It does not seem so clear that the
hierarchical structure that he provides for the knowledge resources as a metrics for
sameness can be applied mechanically by translators in all kinds of weather. First
of all, an embedded joke may not be the translator’s main priority in dealing with
a text. Secondly, a translator may decide that funniness is more important than
sameness of the joke, since the same joke may go down better in some places than
in others, and Attardo’s hierarchy involves preserving sameness, not funniness.
On the whole, Attardo’s suggestions for applying the General Theory of Verbal
Humor to translation only seem to take into consideration joke-texts, i.e. jokes
that make up the whole text, but their validity does not seem so apparent for
translating jokes or other forms of humor that are items of a larger text. Of course,
a map like the ones in figure 1a and figure 3, could easily be read as a hierarchy
of equivalence, i.e. translators of jokes should first aim for [1], only if nothing can
be found for [1], should they proceed to [2], then [3], and so on. But this is not the
case because the binary branching map is meant as a descriptive tool for scholars,
not a prescriptive guideline for translators, although they could use it to help them
establish their own list of priorities. Furthermore, a certain passage that is
analysed as a joke, and is put under the scrutiny of a binary branching map, or is
critically measured according to the General Theory of Verbal Humor similarity
metrics hierarchy, might also be analysed as something else (an insult, a
metaphor, a friendly gesture, a speech opener), and the translator may have
preferred to deal with the item according to a type-within-type scheme for, say,
speech-openers. This may mean that translators are wrongfully blamed by
scholars and critics for not achieving sameness in their versions for aspects that
that they actually had no intention of preserving, since they were working

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Humor and translation

according to a different set of criteria. Critics and scholars should not, therefore,
take for granted that translators approach a translation task, exactly as they would
want them to, assuming that when the translation deviates from that approach it is
not because the translator had something else in mind but that he or she simply
was not up to the job, or that the text provides more evidence that translation is
impossible. If we cannot always see the logic or the merit of a translation, it may
be due to some failing of our own, it may be a matter of looking harder.
Let us take the Knowledge Resources, Script Opposition (SO), Logical
Mechanism (LM), Situation (SI), Target (TA), Narrative Strategy (NS), Language
(LA), as proposed in the general Theory of Verbal Humor and use them as
parameters for joke typologies to analyse the translation of certain jokes. We
could arrange them as in figure 3, following their hierarchical order. This would
provide us with a potential “prescriptive” tool or illustration of degrees of
similarity between the ST joke and its possible renderings.

Figure 3. Adapting the hierarchical organization of the GTVH Knowledge

Resources to binary branch translational analysis

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Humor and translation

Attardo (2002) spells it out as “if possible, respect all six Knowledge Resources in
your translation, but if necessary, let your translation differ at the lowest level
[starting with LA, at the bottom, and ending with SO, at the top] necessary for
your pragmatic purposes”. We have just seen how binary branching can represent
degrees of equivalence. On some occasions we might wish to prescribe or simply
advise the greatest possible degree of equivalence, or similarity, as Attardo does
here, but translation scholars on the most part shy away both from prescriptive
approaches to translation, and even—many of them—from the notion of
equivalence, at least as a theoretical concept.

Example 7
Here comes Joe with that dragon/cow/fox/rat/dog/worm close behind him.

Example 7 could be analysed as an instance of humor, regardless of its quality or

taste. The point is that “dragon/...” can be analysed as an attempt at being funny,
and we could apply a certain binary branching tree analysis to all the various
potential translations as part of a study of the translation of humor within a larger
text that example 7 might have been extracted from. However, “dragon/...” might
also be analysed as an insult, or a metaphor of Joe’s boss. So, we could have at
least three different trees diagrams like the one in figure 1(b), one for P=item of
humor, one for P=insult, and one for P=metaphor. The potential of dragon/... for
humor, insult, or metaphor, may vary considerably from one community to
another, depending on traditions and beliefs associated to (Chinese) dragons,
(sacred) cows, and so on. The demand on researcher and critic alike, regardless of
whether they are in translation or in humor studies, is to try and establish the
translator’s rationale for dealing with each item (his or her system of priorities)
and the difficulties involved (his or her restrictions) against the backdrop of the
text as a whole, and ultimately the situation in which it will be received.

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Humor and translation

8. The translator among other restrictive forces

There are many obstacles to overcome during the translating process, restrictions
of all sorts. Most notably, contrastive differences in any of the following areas:
 background knowledge of the two audiences,
 moral and cultural values (taboo), habits and traditions,
 traditional joke-themes (politics, professions, relationships) and types (T-
shirts, graffiti, comic strips, music-hall, slapstick).
Some traditional theories of translation seem to forget the presence of the
translator, unless it is to issue a series of do’s and don’t’s, golden rules, and rules
of thumb. These theories draw diagrams with arrows going from language A to
language B via all sorts of routes but fundamentally bypassing the translator, the
implication being that translations (should) come out the way they do regardless
of who the translator is. The reasons for this attitude range from “any old fool can
translate” to “the translator must be fluent in two languages (and several other
such conditions which are easy to prescribe but difficult to find in the real
world)”. Whether such scholars are too demanding or simply patronising, they
often seem to be saying that basically what you need is their rulebook or recipe
book. In the real world, each translator has different strengths and weaknesses that
play a significant role in the end result and how each problem is approached,
including humor. The perfect translator does not exist any more than the perfect
translation does. The translator is a variable in the process, and understanding how
translation works involves understanding translators’ profiles and professional
contexts. Of course, even translators are the butt of many a joke, translation itself
may be a joke theme, or a sort of genre (i.e. “lost in translation” joke forms).
What is required, if we acknowledge that no translator, human or otherwise, is
perfect or foolproof, is to find ways of reducing the human-limitation factor. Here
is a short list of examples of the kind of areas where work can be done to improve
translator performance.
 Hiring procedures, specialization and training.
 More social, professional and academic recognition of the value and
difficulties of translating.

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Humor and translation

 Team work.
 Technology and materials.
 Awareness of goals and priorities
All of these general points are applicable to the translation of humor. Indeed,
humor is an area that translators need a certain amount of guidance and practice.
Translators who are not particularly brilliant at translating philosophical essays
may be very good at translating humor, and vice versa, of course. So, if employers
and the public at large really want translations that are good in conveying the
humor of a foreign text, then they might be well advised to spend some time and
effort in finding the right person for the each job, and be willing to pay a decent
fee for the commission. Good translations should be praised and positively
reviewed. To this end both translation and humor scholars should be interested in
developing models for critical analysis of translated humor. It may not be enough
to apply general models of translation or humor analysis, without stopping to
think about the implications of the overlapping area between the two.

9. Conclusions

From this study three main conclusions can be drawn. A knowledge of how
humor works is an important asset for any translator and so it is also necessary for
translation scholars. Sameness according to similarity metrics as the one proposed
by the GTVH (Attardo 2002) does not entail that funniness will be preserved to
the same degree. Neither sameness nor funniness are necessarily goals of the same
importance for the translator in all instances of source-text humor production. A
translator’s goals depend on a host of variables of many different sorts. Analysing
or judging the translation of humor should involve understanding to the best of
one’s ability what the translator’s motivations, criteria and circumstances were in
dealing with each item of the text.

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Humor and translation

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Note

Correspondence address: patrick.zabalbeascoa@upf.edu

1. For more on the theory of translation see Kussmaul 1998; Nord 1997, 2001;
Reiss and Vermeer 1984; Toury 1995; and Zabalbeascoa 1997.

References

Attardo, Salvatore

2002 “Translation and Humor”, in Vandaele (ed.) Translating Humor, Special

Issue of The Translator, St Jerome, Manchester.

Attardo, Salvatore, and Victor Raskin

1991 ‘Script Theory Revis(it)ed: Joke Similarity and Joke Representation

Model’, HUMOR 4(3-4): 293-347.

Delabastita, Dirk

1994 ‘Focus on the Pun’, Target 6:2, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Hammond, Paul, and Patrick Hughes

1978 Upon the Pun. Dual Meaning in Words and Pictures. London: W.H.
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Kussmaul, Paul

1998 "Types of Creative Translating", in Andrew Chesterman et alia (eds.)

Translation in Context. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Nash, Walter

1985 The Language of Humor, English Language Series Title 16, London and
New York: Longman.

Nida, Eugene

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Humor and translation

1964 Towards a Science of Translating, Leyden: E.J. Brill.

Nord, Christiane

1997 Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Functionalist Approaches

Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

2001 ‘Loyalty Revisited. Bible Translation as a Case in Point’, Anthony Pym,

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Raskin, Victor

1985 Semantic Mechanisms of Humor, Dordrecht, Boston & Lancaster: D.

Reidel.

Reiss, Katharina, and Hans J. Vermeer

1984 Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Tübingen:

Niemeyer.

Ruch, Willibald, Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin

1993 “Towards an Empirical Verification of the General Theory of Verbal

Humor”, HUMOR 6(2).

Toury, Gideon

1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Vandaele, Jeroen (ed.)

2002 Translating Humor, Special Issue of The Translator, St Jerome,

Manchester.

Zabalbeascoa, Patrick

1996 “Translating Jokes for Dubbed Television Situation Comedies”, in Dirk

Delabastita (guest editor), The Translator, Vol. 2 Num 2.1996, Special

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1997 “Dubbing and the Nonverbal Dimension of Translation”, 1997, in Fernando

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Poyatos, ed., Nonverbal Communication and Translation, John Benjamins

Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

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