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 coinciding scripts also oppose each other in such a way as to create a humorous incongruity. A basic canned joke such as

Q: “What invention made it possible for humans to walk through walls?”

A: “The door.”

contains two scripts, one that leads the recipient to imagine an invention that would allow people to literally walk through solid walls and a second, more straightforward, albeit “hidden” script that refers to the everyday object that allows us to move between the different parts of a building separated by walls, namely doors. Such a joke presents no particular problems in terms of translation because, while playing upon the indistinctness of the preposition “through” collocated with the concept of “crossing walls” and thus conjuring up a literal as well as a more commonsensical script, most modern languages possess similar notions regarding walls and how to overcome them through the use of doors, as can be seen by the Spanish and German translations:

P: “¿Cuál fue el invento que permitió a los seres humanos atravesar las paredes?”

R: “La puerta.”

F: “Dank welcher Erfindung können Menschen durch Wände laufen?”

A: “Türen.”

While Spanish and German are very different languages in formal terms, both translations closely [Page 773]mirror the original English witticism in both form and content. Furthermore, the script opposition remains identical in both languages. Translational problems arise when verbal humor is either extremely language specific, extremely culture specific, or, as is often the case, a combination of lingua-cultural specificity.