Translation

Translation is an extremely broad and far-reaching notion that first and foremost refers to what Roman Jakobson famously labeled interlingual translation, namely the transfer of a message from one language to another (e.g., English into Arabic, Spanish into Russian, Chinese into Italian, etc.). Translating humor between languages is notoriously considered to be a particularly difficult task.

The role of script opposition, an aspect of the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH) proposed by Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin (1991), is an essential element of verbal humor. According to this theory, instances of verbal humor such as jokes, gags, and witticisms are composed of two overlapping scripts, one of which is concealed while simultaneously overlapping another more hidden script in a watertight manner. Concurrently, however, these two ...