What translation techniques do you employ while translating humor?

Question

I'm expected to write a piece of work about how translating English humor works. I'm to include translation techniques that are made use of in the process, as well as the most often problems that may occur while rendering.

Answer 1

Hmmm ... interesting question. Well, here are a couple of problems ...

1) Puns and wordplays in English don't translate well into foreign languages, and vice versa. For your listeners to get the joke, they'll probably have to have more knowledge of the other tongue than you can reliably count on them having.

2) Jokes that depend on cultural references may not translate well, if at all. The reference might not exist in the other culture, or it might be called something else.

For example, I know a pretty good naughty joke that refers to "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater" **and** I speak Spanish. But if I'm going to try to tell that joke to some friends in Mexico, I need to make sure that people there have heard of that nursery rhyme AND that the character in that rhyme is called Peter (or Pedro or Pepe, as it were). If either of those isn't true, and I just tell the joke by directly translating it from English into Spanish, it'll fall flat.

I guess what it comes down to is you have to work a lot harder to make sure you know your audience ... which is a good general practice in all writing and public speaking, not just translating jokes.

Hope that helped a little! :-)

Answer 2

Translated poems fall into no less than 2 classes: those who furnish a unfastened verse translation and those who take a look at to imitate the type, voice and rhyme of the usual. The former sort are such a lot typical due to the fact that they're the simplest, and on account that unfastened verse is so typical for trendy poetry, this type of translation is authorised. The best editions in this topic is the extent of "poetic voice" utilized by the translating poet. I consider an extra responder implied this as good once they mentioned there's a change among 'unhappy' and different phrases that suggest equivalent that means however in a fairly distinctive manner. This could also be why there are more commonly multiple 'translation' of a poem. The latter class of translated poems are extra complex, and for this reason are the extra infrequent. When they're performed good, they come to be popular of their possess proper. The great illustration of that is typically "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" through Fitzgerald, in which he now not best mixed dozens of "rubias" right into a unmarried poem, however located them in a logical order, retained the rhyme scheme, beat and meter of the usual Persian, and "transliterated" their that means so good that after I observed a replica of the usual rubias, along side literal translations, the e-book was once opened with Fitzgerald's 5 variations of his poem. This is massive should you don't forget the e-book was once written, released and offered within the Middle East. So, does a translated poem "have got to" rhyme if the usual did so? No, but if the translated poem keeps extra of the flavour of the usual, they have a tendency to have a extra valuable have an impact on. There are circumstances in which the one translations are literal translations and as such, specifically if the usual poetry was once popular, they do good available on the market...however in which that is the case, it is the usual poet that's titled and identified, now not the translator.

Answer 3

The first rule of any 'technique' that requires writing is to use as few multiple sylable words as possible.
Humor is the same way.
The amount of laughter gained from humor is usually based on the 'delivery' and inflection of the spoken word.