Lost in the translation of jokes: the untranslatability of culturally-bound humor
The old story goes that a 6th-7th century Arab poet feared for his bitter satirical poetry called Hutai’ah wrote a line, as part of an offensive poem, attacking a rich man in Madinah. At the surface level, the words sounded not that critical, but for those who had a good grip of language, the poet was extremely sarcastic and insulting of the man he targeted.
Hutai’ah simply said: Stop the pursuit of good manners and sit (at home) to be fed and dressed up.
When Caliph Omar heard the case from the victim, the plaintiff, he consulted two Muslim poets, who agreed that it was not only a mockery, but the poet, ” literally covered the man with dirt.”
The trick was mainly in one word: “sit”, because it had gained a new connotation in the Islamic context, in an allusion to a verse in the Quran (9-86) slamming the rich hypocrites who refused to fight with the Muslim army as asked for permission to “sit at home”. In other words, an Arab before Islam would not get the gist here, because the concept was not part of that pre-Islamic culture in Arabia. It was culturally-bound.
The translatability of culturally-bound humor has been a key topic of research in the field.
According to scholars, people crack jokes to break the ice in social situations and use humor to change the mood into a lighter one. People joke about everything from politics to celebrities, religion, animals and every aspect of the human life. Cultural jokes contain an aspect of the local culture that is hard to translate in a way that draws the same reaction from the receptors.
In fact, understanding the punchline of a joke in another language is in itself a sign of mastery of this language. The Guardian quotes a language professor as saying: “It is not just a question of linguistic ability but of a profound understanding of the cultural context of the humor.”
Humor takes the form of a joke, which is short and aimed to draw laughter, or wordplay, irony, parody, satire, sarcasm and spoonerism, among others and almost all require a deep understanding of the cultural-linguistic dimension to appreciate. However, no necessarily. There is a type of joke called the international joke, which is defined as one that “does not share the play on linguistic features or references to culture. The content of international joke is universally known enough for the target audiences to understand in context.”
For translators, there is a solution to avoid a “lost in translation” situation. Scholars suggest a resort to compensation methods. These techniques include adaptation, when the translator “replaces a social or cultural reality in the source language with a corresponding reality in the target language”. There is also the borrowing method, a procedure where the translator “uses a word or expression from the source language in the target language”.
An important technique is the translator’s note, when he or she adds their own explanation of the humor in the source language. The translator may also paraphrase, using the footnotes to explain the untranslatable.
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