Of course these are not all categories of conversational humour, which appear during natural human interactions. Apart from words there are also facial expressions, gestures and strange ways of doing something that contribute to making a person laugh.
Attardo (1994: 128) presents a detailed analysis of the fallowing pun:
Why did the cookie cry?
Its mother had been away for so long. [a wafer]
(Pepicello and Green 1983: 59).
Already the first sentence “activates the scripts for cookie and cry” in the hearers mind and forces them to change their view of the world to one in which cookies can cry. The second sentence also activates appropriate scripts, however, the hearer is prepared to adjust expectations to the unreal world and thus is not …show more content…
There are two main barriers which have to be somehow overstepped by translators: different languages and different cultures. Although humour is seen as untranslatable some translators feel obliged to pick up the gauntlet and do their best. The translation of verbally expressed humour was ignored due to its complexity and those who tried to translate it usually translated literary works. Moreover, the translation of verbally expressed humour on screen is a relatively new issue (Chiaro 2008: 569-570). Vandaele (2010: 149-150) claims that humour is visible through laughter and smile and accordingly the failure of translating humour is visual through lack of laugh or smile. A translator should be aware that humour is group and culture specific thus parodies for example may be funny only to those who have seen the parodied movie, book or other source. One should be a part of that group or culture to understand that kind of humour and to be able to translate it. Moreover, translators have to cope with the problem of ethical and political correctness because some humour utterances may be censored by certain institutions or regimes. Another cause of humour untranslatability is linguistic denotation, connotation and metalingual communication where the linguistic form matters. For instance the previously presented pun about the cookie would not be funny in polish language. Denotation is problematic when humour focuses on a “concept or reality which is specific to a certain language” and connotation when “a concept in the source language has a different >>lectal<< value than its usual equivalent in the target language” (Vandaele 2010: 150). No matter whether the translator deals with a short joke, a long novel or movie, a pun or irony the transfer of humour from source language to the target language will cause practical and theoretical problems because this kind of translation touches upon the most debatable problems of
Attardo (1994: 128) presents a detailed analysis of the fallowing pun:
Why did the cookie cry?
Its mother had been away for so long. [a wafer]
(Pepicello and Green 1983: 59).
Already the first sentence “activates the scripts for cookie and cry” in the hearers mind and forces them to change their view of the world to one in which cookies can cry. The second sentence also activates appropriate scripts, however, the hearer is prepared to adjust expectations to the unreal world and thus is not …show more content…
There are two main barriers which have to be somehow overstepped by translators: different languages and different cultures. Although humour is seen as untranslatable some translators feel obliged to pick up the gauntlet and do their best. The translation of verbally expressed humour was ignored due to its complexity and those who tried to translate it usually translated literary works. Moreover, the translation of verbally expressed humour on screen is a relatively new issue (Chiaro 2008: 569-570). Vandaele (2010: 149-150) claims that humour is visible through laughter and smile and accordingly the failure of translating humour is visual through lack of laugh or smile. A translator should be aware that humour is group and culture specific thus parodies for example may be funny only to those who have seen the parodied movie, book or other source. One should be a part of that group or culture to understand that kind of humour and to be able to translate it. Moreover, translators have to cope with the problem of ethical and political correctness because some humour utterances may be censored by certain institutions or regimes. Another cause of humour untranslatability is linguistic denotation, connotation and metalingual communication where the linguistic form matters. For instance the previously presented pun about the cookie would not be funny in polish language. Denotation is problematic when humour focuses on a “concept or reality which is specific to a certain language” and connotation when “a concept in the source language has a different >>lectal<< value than its usual equivalent in the target language” (Vandaele 2010: 150). No matter whether the translator deals with a short joke, a long novel or movie, a pun or irony the transfer of humour from source language to the target language will cause practical and theoretical problems because this kind of translation touches upon the most debatable problems of