7. FREE PLAY TO HUMOUR

Now it is time to give free play to humour and give life to what has been claimed up to this point.

Here is a list of jokes proper of the Italian, English and German language; there will be jokes consisting of aspects belonging to the related culture and as a consequence they will be difficult to translate. Then there will be Italian jokes about Pierino, the Italian Carabinieri and unfaithful husbands; jokes representing the British humour and then also German ones which, compared to the other two languages, are the most difficult to understand and laugh at.

ITALIAN JOKES

- La lana di vetro si fa con le pecore di Murano?

Glass wool is produced by the Murano’s sheeps?

- Grave incidente d’auto: perde il braccio destro. La polizia indaga sul sinistro.

Serious car accident: loose the right arm: the police is investigating about the left one/ the accident.

- Ci sono due carabinieri allo specchio; uno dice all’altro < Guarda due colleghi, andiamo a salutarli> E l’altro <Fermo! Stanno venendo loro!>

There are two Carabinieri watching theirselves in the mirror; one says to the other < Look two colleagues, let’s go to say hello> And the other one <Stop! They are coming!> 

continue to: 7. FREE PLAY TO HUMOUR

6. TYPES OF HUMOUR IN TRANSLATION

Now it’s time to join humour and translation analyzing how the different kinds of humour can be classified, simply outlining what is important from the translator’s point of view.

6.2 UNRESTRICTED / INTERNATIONAL

Some jokes and types of humour offer no resistance to translation when the source and the target languages and cultural systems overlap, when the text users of both communities have the same shared knowledge.

A translator may not worry so much that a joke might be considered international, as long as universal, because it can easily cross from the source text to the target text without any need for adaptation or substitution because of linguistic or cultural differences; it can be literally translated with no loss of humour or content or meaning...

continue to: 6. TYPES OF HUMOUR IN TRANSALTION

5. TRANSLATION, A MATTER OF CULTURE

The translation process is an as fascinating as problematic art. The difficulties linked to translation come from a series of factors and aspects which are not only linked to the translation field but also embrace cultural matters.

The language is the mirror of a culture and of how it perceives and sees the world, it lives indeed in an interdependence relationship with the culture of which it belongs and it is almost impossible to split them, because when we talk about language we refer to the culture it represents and when we talk about culture we refer to the language through it expresses itself.

There are also terms reach of cultural references and difficult to translate that are even not explained in the dictionaries, because they are so connected to the geographical and cultural reality that will lose their sense and value beyond such reality, and if the translation itself is already an hard work, this becomes worsen when to all of this are added also humorous expressions.

This is the most difficult obstacle a translator has to overcome. He knows that it is hard to keep the comical effect of the source language in the target language, particularly if the effect on which comic is based is the wordplay because in the words are hidden out and out cultural universes, difficult to translate in the other language or perhaps translatable but incomprehensible for the interlocutor of the target language, because he has no structures able to perceive that incongruity and so it will become for him semantically inaccessible...

continue to: 5. TRANSLATION, A MATTER OF CULTURE

4. THE INTERCULTURAL HUMOR: WHY LAUGHING IS GLOBAL

In this chapter are contained the most interesting and fascinating aspects of this study; namely the reason why humour is hardly understood among people of different cultures, because as we know is difficult to German people to laugh at a joke told by an Italian and vice versa.
If we flip through the pages of a whatever encyclopedia, we will find at the word ‘ intercultural communication’ this definition: “ a form of dialogue among different cultures. Individually, it offers the likelihood to extend our own cultural baggage through the knowledge of traditions, usages and customs different from those proper of the society we usually live in.“

But a logic consequence, which usually occurs, is that the subjects committed in the communication may not understand each other and may not realize such misunderstanding, until they run into a failed comprehension. Indeed what Delia Chiaro claims is that “the concept of what people find funny seems surrounded by linguistic, geographical, sociocultural and personal barriers.”

In order to understand humour, an interlocutor should know, besides the grammar structures of a language, also the sociocultural ones implied in the humorous text...

  continue to: 4. THE INTERCULTURAL HUMOR: WHY LAUGHING IS GLOBAL

---

3. INCONGRUITY THEORY

Up to this point it has been explained how scholars and philosophers of different epochs have tried to give a definition to the phenomenon of humour.

From now on more recent theories will be enunciated, which will let us understand which is that mechanism that sets off the spark and let realize what happens when a joke is being told, in a few words, the decoding process, so the incongruity theory.
What happens in a person’s mind when he is reading or listening to a joke?

We all have in our brain a cognitive model, a mental structure which is the synthesis of past experiences, when the information coming are dissimilar to the model, we feel an “incongruity”.
When we listen to a joke our brain elaborates the information distinguishing between two phases; in the first phase we detect the situation with the first part denied from the last part and we perceive the incongruity, while in the second phase we put to use a mechanism aimed to give sense to the conclusion, reconciling the incongruous parts.

The first author who talked about incongruity connected to laugh was Schopenhauer: “The reason why we laugh, anyway, is simply the sudden perception of incongruity between a concept and the real objects that have been though on its base, the laugh itself is the expression of this incongruity”...

             continue to: 3. INCONGRUITY THEORY

2. HUMOUR IN ACTION

Humour expresses itself in different ways which are proper either of the verbal or non-verbal language.

A technique of non-verbal humour is the caricature that is usually a really simple and essential humorous or sarcastic drawing, portraying a person intentionally maimed.

The oral form of humour includes the pun that concentrates in only one or two sentences the comical effect, the imitation that is the activity of reproducing behaviours proper of a pre-existing model; typical examples are comedians’ imitations of funny people in the cabarets that are usually appreciated by the audience and finally the evergreen joke...

               continue to: HUMOUR IN ACTION

1. A COLLECTION OF STUDIES ABOUT HUMOUR

Mechanisms of humour have developed a keen interest in different scholars of different countries and epochs which have developed different theories, in the attempt to answer these questions: what is humour, what provokes humour, why we laugh, what is laugh, what do the grimace of a clown, a wordplay and a scene of a comedy have in common?

        continue to: 1. A COLLECTION OF STUDIES ABOUT HUMOUR

INTRODUCTION

“Only humour, marvelous invention of who is being broken off the vocation for the biggest things, the invention of nearly tragic or unhappy people having the highest intelligence; only humour (maybe the most extraordinary and brilliant gimmick of the mankind) carries out the impossible, lights up and joins all the area of human nature”.

This quote by famous German writer and poet Herman Hesse introduces at its best the following study about humour.

Humour was born together with the human being, it is expression of the way to perceive and ridicule reality, as well as what surrounds us, what frightens or perhaps makes us sad or annoyed.

Being linked to the man and especially to the culture and the language which it represents, it varies from nation to nation because it is related to socio-cultural aspects which are proper of a specific ethnic group and thus represents one of the major obstacles for a translator who is going to translate a text which is full of humorous expressions. This quote by Virginia Wolf sums up in only one sentence the content and the purpose of such study “Humour is the first quality which disappears in a foreign language.”

                continue to: INTRODUCTION

---