Humour in translation can be caused by translation errors, because of irregularities and discrepancies between certain items that translators attempt to translate. This could be due to the ignorance of the translator, as well as the untranslatability of the text as a result of linguistic or cultural differences.[1] In addition, translation errors can be caused by the language incompetence of the translator in the target language, resulting in unintended ambiguity in the message conveyed. Translation errors can distort the intended meaning of the author or speaker, to the point of absurdity and ludicrousness, giving a humorous and comedic effect.
Translation errors can cause accidental humour, which is similar in effect to intentional humour. Like intentional humour, accidental humour is also a combination of linguistics and culture-specific features, with humour generating devices (like words and phrases) embedded in it, and is just as competent in conveying humour.
Most translation errors are due to the untranslatability of the language and the failure of linguistic domestication and foreignisation processes. For instance, idiomatic expressions of Chinese like 多多少少 ( [ˈduɔ duɔ ʃaʊ ʃaʊˈ] ) means ‘to an extent’ in English. However, if literally translated, the same phrase can mean ‘many many few few’, losing its original meaning and creating a ludicrous expression of meaning.
A case of untranslatability was evident when Coca-Cola first entered the Chinese market in 1928. Initially, Chinese transliterations of "Coca-Cola" used Chinese characters that, when they were combined as a written phrase, resulted in ridiculous readings such as "female horse fastened with wax", or "bite the wax tadpole". There was hence a need to find four Chinese characters with pronunciations that approximated the sound of "Coca-Cola", without producing a nonsensical or adverse meaning. This brand blunder was eventually solved with the characters 可口可乐, which could be translated as "to allow the mouth to be able to rejoice".[2]
Hence the combination and translation of words expressed must conform to the target culture and literal language interpretation or it would result in hilarious misunderstandings. Prime examples of such errors come in the form of poorly translated sign posts, notices and menus that fail to cater the intended meaning to both foreign and local speakers. A famous early example was the nineteenth century Portuguese-English phrase book, English as She Is Spoke.
Translation difficulties
Colloquial expressions and conventions in the source language can cause humour or result in a strange interpretation from the listener or reader in instances when they are not translated into equivalent expressions or conventions in the target language, and instead are translated mechanically or word-for-word.
Difficulties with translation can arise from differences in word order, or from culture-bound expressions, and often also because of the inflexibility of machine translation. Also, it is due partly to the existence of multiple cultural, linguistic and semantic factors which requires machine translation to be supplemented by a human translator to convey the intended message of the source text.
Translation difficulties can therefore cause translation errors, which can result in humour. A more specific elaboration of various causes of translation errors is discussed below.
Translation error types and resultant humour
Below are some components of linguistic stimulus theories that attempts to explain the way humour might be derived from translations, as adapted from "Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English" by M. Farghal in 2006.[3]
External factors like cultural awareness, time considerations, social class and educational considerations, along with internal factors like situation and narrative strategy also plays a big part in the effect of translation on humour.
Ambiguity
Words that are homonymic, paronymic, alliterative or rhyming, or metalinguistic devices of language can be used to produce humour. Also, wordplay which includes the use of puns, one liners, limericks, witticisms, among various others, can be another way to produce humour.[4]
For example, these are some humorous translations done by machine translators:[unreliable source?]
In the office of a doctor in Rome: Specialist in women and other diseases.
In a Japanese hotel: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.
Semantic overlap
Humour can result from the interlocutor's inability to understand homonyms, homographs or semantically related synonym words. Similarly, words with superordinate and subordinate relationships are confused.
Overlapping semantics are difficult to distinguish, especially in translation. Words with multiple meanings (polysemous words) are mostly untranslatable, especially if they contain many connotations. Confusion of sense relations can also result because of semantic overlap. Confusion of sense relations in the set includes the improper use of superonym for hyponym, hyponym for superonym, a whole word for a partial word, a partial word for a whole word, antonym, confusion of co-hyponyms, and misuse of near-synonyms.[5]
An example of semantic overlap found in a golf course:
ANY PERSONS (EXCEPT PLAYERS) CAUGHT COLLECTING GOLF BALLS ON THIS COURSE WILL BE PROSECUTED AND HAVE THEIR BALLS REMOVED[6]
The interlocutor's erroneous choice of word removed instead of confiscated results in accidental humour in the context as shown in the example above. Semantically, removed is a commonly used word to express the action ‘take away’ and both are related in terms of sense. Removed thus may be used as a superordinate form that includes the action of taking away. The humorous aspect of this situation is intensified by the strong use of word removed in the phrase have their balls removed, which suggests an orchidectomy (removal of the testicles) instead of the much less extreme action of confiscation. With the overlapping of semantics, the intended message is thus misinterpreted and accidental humour is resulted.
Lexico-semantic clusterings can result in paradigmatic errors. It reflects the relations between related words and expressions, which is mainly of paradigmatic relations. The humour above is triggered by the translated text consisting of a script-switch trigger, which then results in the double reading. The irony is not lost in the contexts provided.
Lexical gaps (Pragmatics)
Lexical gaps concerns words or phrases having no direct translation in any given language (Untranslatability). Humor, then, results from the interlocutor's inability to grasp the lexical gaps in the target language and linguistic representations may either be over generalised or under-generalised to the point of absurdity.
From a Czech tourist agency:
Take one of our horse-driven city tours. We guarantee no miscarriages.[7]
The humour comes from the translator filling in an English lexical gap based on the lexical noun, "miss" by adding a prefix mis-. English employs the two verbs miss the carriage and miscarriages to mean vastly different actions. There is a lexical gap in English because the action of missing a carriage cannot be expressed with the same import and the same economy of verbalisation. The misuse of this lexical gap and overgeneralisation conflates the ludicrous idea of the horse-driven tours with no miscarriages.
From this example, the interlocutor did not understand English derivations of ‘doer’ nouns such as, specialist, or suppletion such as, experts and mistakenly uses the derivational pattern to coin a lexeme from method. Accidental humour ensues as a result of the same word coinciding with the unlikely homophone Methodist, which refers to the Christian religious denomination, creating a ridiculous situation in the context of dentistry.[9]
An American slogan for Salem cigarettes was, "Salem - Feeling Free,". When translated for marketing in the Japanese market, it means, "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty".[10] This is an example of the translator trying to fill in the connotations of the lexical unit "free", perhaps because of limited vocabulary competency; this thus resulted in an intralingual error. In this case there are actually Japanese terms equivalent to the adjective, "free" (e.g., 自由な).
All being said, languages do have a productive (linguistics) and recursion property that can also allow words and phrases to combine creatively to fill in the lexical gaps.
The following Telugu idiom refers to situations whereby people spends extravagantly, beyond their means:
Minga methuku ledu kaani meesalaki sampenga nooni anta
(He has) no food to eat, but has perfumed oil for his moustache
And this to a situation of idleness, boredom, or conducting frivolous tasks to fill up time [11]
The lady with nothing to do goes to visit her husband's brother's wife's parents' house.
These Telugu expressions above can seem nearly impossible to translate. But with the usage of English to translate and establish the context, the meanings of the expression can be derived to be understandable.
Morpho-phonological similarity
In some cases, incidental humour is produced when interlocutors erroneously use lexemes based on vague morpho-phonological similarity to the target word.
Japan's second-largest tourist agency was bewildered when it initially entered English markets and began receiving overwhelming requests for sexual tours. When they finally understood the problem with their name, Kinki Nippon Tourist Company decided to change it.[12]
An interesting and amusing example would be the pronunciation of English words with Chinese translatability by actor Xiao Xiao Bin in the 2010 comedy-martial arts film Just Call Me Nobody:
[Yes] → 爷死 /ji̯ɛ sɨ/ ‘Grandpa dies’
[Nice] → 奶死 /naɪ̯ sɨ/ ‘Grandma dies’
[Bus] → 爸死 /bɑ sɨ/ ‘Dad dies’
[Knees] → 你死 /ni sɨ/ ‘You die’
[Was] → 我死 /wu̯ɔ sɨ/‘I die’
[Does] → 都死 /tɤʊ̯ sɨ/ ‘All die’
[One dollar] → 完蛋了 /wu̯an tan lɯ̯ʌ/ ‘It’s over’
These examples illustrate the complete loss of the original meaning of the English words. Though the Chinese-to-English words sound almost phonetically correct, the pronunciation is easily translatable to a Chinese lexeme of a depressing meaning (e.g.: ‘All die’). With the juxtaposition of the intended and accidental meaning with the cheerful pragmatics of the film, the translation becomes a hilariously erroneous one.
Misspelling
Misspelled words can be portrayed as the most basic level of inducing unintentional humour that occurs in all translations, especially in signs or restaurants' menus. The ability to create humour out of misspelled words in translations happens in particular when the lexical items in a phrase or sentence are well-known and common to English speakers but in a particular context; the lexical items appears to possess a totally different meaning that could be inappropriate at times.[13]
Dialectal differences
Language varieties include regional, social, and temporal dialects. For example, there are noticeable dialectal differences in the Chinese language used in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and other parts of Asia. The Spanish usage in Spain, Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and the U.S. have many variants as well.[14] Unintended humor can happen when the translation criterion is merely a linguistic one without taking into account the users of the translation, e.g. the English word unit (apartment) mean very different things in Chinese regional dialects.[15][14]
Related Research Articles
In linguistics, a false friend is a word in a different language that looks or sounds similar to a word in a given language, but differs significantly in meaning. Examples of false friends include English embarrassed and Spanish embarazada 'pregnant'; English parents versus Portuguese parentes and Italian parenti ; English demand and French demander 'ask'; and English gift, German Gift 'poison', and Norwegian gift 'married'.
A pun, also rarely known as paronomasia, is a form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect. These ambiguities can arise from the intentional use of homophonic, homographic, metonymic, or figurative language. A pun differs from a malapropism in that a malapropism is an incorrect variation on a correct expression, while a pun involves expressions with multiple interpretations. Puns may be regarded as in-jokes or idiomatic constructions, especially as their usage and meaning are usually specific to a particular language or its culture.
An idiom is a phrase or expression that usually presents a figurative, non-literal meaning attached to the phrase. Some phrases which become figurative idioms, however, do retain the phrase's literal meaning. Categorized as formulaic language, an idiom's figurative meaning is different from the literal meaning. Idioms occur frequently in all languages; in English alone there are an estimated twenty-five million idiomatic expressions.
Word play or wordplay is a literary technique and a form of wit in which words used become the main subject of the work, primarily for the purpose of intended effect or amusement. Examples of word play include puns, phonetic mix-ups such as spoonerisms, obscure words and meanings, clever rhetorical excursions, oddly formed sentences, double entendres, and telling character names.
In linguistics, a neologism is any relatively recent and isolated term, word, or phrase that nevertheless has achieved popular or institutional recognition, and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered a neologism once it is published in a dictionary.
Polysemy is the capacity for a sign to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from monosemy, where a word has a single meaning.
In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal word-for-word or root-for-root translation. When used as a verb, “to calque” means to borrow a word or phrase from another language while translating its components, so as to create a new lexeme in the target language. For instance, the English word "skyscraper" has been calqued in dozens of other languages, combining words for "sky" and "scrape" in each language, as for example, German: Wolkenkratzer, Portuguese: Arranha-céu. Another notable example is the Latin weekday names, which came to be associated by ancient Germanic speakers with their own gods following a practice known as interpretatio germanica: the Latin "Day of Mercury", Mercurii dies, was borrowed into Late Proto-Germanic as the "Day of Wōđanaz" (Wodanesdag), which became Wōdnesdæg in Old English, then "Wednesday" in Modern English.
Lexical semantics, as a subfield of linguistic semantics, is the study of word meanings. It includes the study of how words structure their meaning, how they act in grammar and compositionality, and the relationships between the distinct senses and uses of a word.
Conceptual semantics is a framework for semantic analysis developed mainly by Ray Jackendoff in 1976. Its aim is to provide a characterization of the conceptual elements by which a person understands words and sentences, and thus to provide an explanatory semantic representation. Explanatory in this sense refers to the ability of a given linguistic theory to describe how a component of language is acquired by a child.
Phono-semantic matching (PSM) is the incorporation of a word into one language from another, often creating a neologism, where the word's non-native quality is hidden by replacing it with phonetically and semantically similar words or roots from the adopting language. Thus the approximate sound and meaning of the original expression in the source language are preserved, though the new expression in the target language may sound native.
Untranslatability is the property of text or speech for which no equivalent can be found when translated into another (given) language. A text that is considered to be untranslatable is considered a lacuna, or lexical gap. The term arises when describing the difficulty of achieving the so-called perfect translation. It is based on the notion that there are certain concepts and words that are so interrelated that an accurate translation becomes an impossible task. Some writers have suggested that language carries sacred notions or is intrinsic to national identity. Brian James Baer posits that untranslatability is sometimes seen by nations as proof of the national genius. He quotes Alexandra Jaffe: "When translators talk about untranslatable, they often reinforce the notion that each language has its own 'genius', an 'essence' that naturally sets it apart from all other languages and reflects something of the 'soul' of its culture or people".
In semantics, the best-known types of semantic equivalence are dynamic equivalence and formal equivalence, which employ translation approaches that focus, respectively, on conveying the meaning of the source text; and that lend greater importance to preserving, in the translation, the literal structure of the source text. Nida formulated the distinction originally in relation to Bible translations.
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In computer science, the syntax of a computer language is the rules that define the combinations of symbols that are considered to be correctly structured statements or expressions in that language. This applies both to programming languages, where the document represents source code, and to markup languages, where the document represents data.
An unpaired word is one that, according to the usual rules of the language, would appear to have a related word but does not. Such words usually have a prefix or suffix that would imply that there is an antonym, with the prefix or suffix being absent or opposite. If the prefix or suffix is negative, such as 'dis-' or -'less', the word can be called an orphaned negative.
In linguistics, lexicalization is the process of adding words, set phrases, or word patterns to a language's lexicon.
David Swinney was a prominent psycholinguist. His research on language comprehension contributed to methodological advances in his field.
Transfer-based machine translation is a type of machine translation (MT). It is currently one of the most widely used methods of machine translation. In contrast to the simpler direct model of MT, transfer MT breaks translation into three steps: analysis of the source language text to determine its grammatical structure, transfer of the resulting structure to a structure suitable for generating text in the target language, and finally generation of this text. Transfer-based MT systems are thus capable of using knowledge of the source and target languages.
Technical translation is a type of specialized translation involving the translation of documents produced by technical writers, or more specifically, texts which relate to technological subject areas or texts which deal with the practical application of scientific and technological information. While the presence of specialized terminology is a feature of technical texts, specialized terminology alone is not sufficient for classifying a text as "technical" since numerous disciplines and subjects which are not "technical" possess what can be regarded as specialized terminology. Technical translation covers the translation of many kinds of specialized texts and requires a high level of subject knowledge and mastery of the relevant terminology and writing conventions.
In linguistics an accidental gap, also known as a gap, paradigm gap, accidental lexical gap, lexical gap, lacuna, or hole in the pattern, is a potential word, word sense, morpheme, or other form that does not exist in some language despite being theoretically permissible by the grammatical rules of that language. For example, a word pronounced is theoretically possible in English, as it would obey English word-formation rules, but does not currently exist. Its absence is therefore an accidental gap, in the ontologic sense of the word accidental.
References
Using the wrong reference may change the translator's intended meaning and lead to multiple comical interpretations for the readers, thus, producing various humorous scripts. For example,a sign in a Chinese Safari Park states:
大象在此 请留在车上 Elephants Here Please Stay In Your Car
The translator intended to refer the general public that are visiting the park as the implicit reference marker of the sign by using the co-referential anaphor 'your', but failed to do so and instead, the explicit anaphor 'Your' unintentionally picks up 'elephants' as the textual referent. Thus, this give rise to a humorous script that looks as though that the sign is meant for the elephants and not the people. This example also highlights the importance of having punctuation to serve as a cohesion device because if the translator were to put a full stop or exclamation point after the word 'Elephants Here', the anaphor 'your' would have been interpreted literally by readers. It would have also eliminated a humorous reading.
An article in Soviet Weekly reports
There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years.
Similarly, there is a mishap of the anaphoric reference marker 'these', which to the interpretation of readers, refers to 'Soviet Republic painters and sculptors'. Thus, it conveys the idea that thousands of painters and sculptors were executed over the past two years. In terms of the translator's intentions, the reference marker 'these' actually refers textually to the referent 'Arts' or, perhaps, 'the painters and sculptors' works' and not the 'Soviet Republic painters and sculptors' themselves. Hence, this script lacks an eligible textual referent to accurately bring across the intended message. Although this script is easily decipherable based upon one's basic knowledge, it still causes laughter.[16]
Word order
Word order is the way in which syntactic constituents of a language arrange itself in a phrase or a sentence. Different languages employ different structures of word order. Direct translation of one language to another may result in wrong placement of a phrase in relation to the other constituents in the sentence. This may cause a change to the initial meaning of the translator and hence, may trigger a humorous script.
A sign in the lobby of a Moscow hotel across a Russian Orthodox monastery states
Вы можете посетить кладбище, где известные российские и советские композиторы, художники и писатели похоронены ежедневно, кроме четверга. You are welcome to visit the cemetery where famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers are buried daily except Thursday.
Because of to the incorrect placement of the adverbial phrase ‘daily except Thursday’ at the end of the sentence, this script generates unintentional humour in its translation. The adverbial phrase ‘daily except Thursday’ becomes a post-modifier which misguides the reader into thinking that the script is about the act of burying ‘famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers’, instead of conveying the act of visiting the cemetery. Apparently, the translator wanted to avoid a possible awkwardness of phrasing the post-modifier after the appropriate act, but was unaware that the parentheses applied would also enclose another awkward and comical adverbial at the same time.
A menu in a Tokyo bar shows:
Special cocktails for the ladies with nuts.
Likewise, the humour in this case is also caused by the wrong placement of the prepositional phrase ‘with nuts’ as a post-modifier of ‘the ladies’ instead of its intended referent ‘cocktails’ as a post-modifier. Although the mishap is triggered by the mistaken word order, which can be changed to "Special cocktails with nuts for the ladies", it would still have remained as an awkward sentence because of the polysemous word ‘nuts’. Thus, if the word ‘nuts’ were to be replaced with ‘cashews’, a humorous translation error could have been avoided. Therefore, attachment sites of prepositional phrases are a notorious source of ambiguity in English.[17]
"Prawo Jazdy", an alleged criminal in Ireland whose name comes from the Polish phrase for "driver's licence" (as erroneously entered by the Irish police onto their records).
↑ Allman, N.F. (1957). "Transliteration of 'Coca-Cola' Trade-Mark to Chinese Characters." Coca-Cola Overseas, pp. 10-11.
↑ Farghal, M. (2006). Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (12), 2. Retrieved from http://immi.se/intercultural/nr12/farghal.htm
↑ Fraser, J. (2009). Appendix C: English Signage from around the world. In English: the Prototypical World Language for the Twenty First Century (p. 205).
↑ Al-Kharabsheh, A. (2008). "Unintentional Humour in the Translation of Jordanian Shop Signs." In Journal of Intercultural Communication, ISSN 1404-1634, 17. Retrieved from http://www.immi.se/intercultural/nr17/kharabsheh.htm
↑ Farghal, M. (2006). Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (12), 2. Retrieved from http://immi.se/intercultural/nr12/farghal.htm
↑ Farghal, M. (2006). Accidental Humor in International Public Notices Displayed in English. Journal of Intercultural Communication, (12), 2. Retrieved from http://immi.se/intercultural/nr12/farghal.htm
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