Wordplay and Translation: Special Issue of 'The Translator' 22 1996 (Translator S) by Rachel Weissbrod

Author:Rachel Weissbrod
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781134965953
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2016-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

2. The language of humour and parody: Walter Nash’s contribution

Delia Chiaro points out that situation comedy rests very much on dramatic irony and on people’s misfortunes, two ingredients that she finds ‘translatable’. I submit that many of the problems she associates with the extent of culture-specificity of humour may be linked to the concept of parody: after all, beyond the parodic dimension, the problems of culture-specificity are common to many other types of translation in fields as wide apart as history books, tourist guides, advertisements, literature and so on. It is in this light that Walter Nash’s book The Language of Humour (1985) offers some interesting insights into how one might deal with certain aspects of humour in translation, although the book is not on translation as such.

Nash says that the test of good parody is not how closely it imitates or reproduces certain turns of phrase, but how convincingly it generates a style like that of the parodied author, producing the sort of phrases and sentences s/he might have produced. This raises “the question of how we recognize a parody or a parodic intention; for here, as in other forms of humour, laughter depends on some sort of framework of expectancy” (ibid:87–88). For Nash,

even when the reader is not sure just what is being parodied, it may still be possible to recognize parodic intention. The parodist takes care as a rule to create notable discrepancies: both discrepancies of ‘fit’ between expression and content and discrepancies of style on the plane of expression itself. (ibid:88; my emphasis)

We might expect the same to apply in the case of a dubbed version of a foreign audiovisual text.

The two types of discrepancies mentioned by Nash could be illustrated by the use of formal register in the discussion of a trivial subject and the insertion of colloquial or substandard words into a stylistically elevated text, respectively. The kind of dissecting of the language of humour that Nash performs throughout his book can be a very useful source of inspiration for the translator, since it enables us to look inside each joke, and even larger units, and understand how they were put together, the better to translate them:

Perception of stylistic discrepancy confirms [the reader’s] assumptions about the wayward content; what he has before him is either a piece of absurdly ill-judged writing, or an essay in buffoonery, probably of a parodic nature …. [H]umorous writing may have a parodic semblance without being a parody of anything in particular, and … we can hugely enjoy a text without being able to identify a specific parodic source. (ibid: 89)

In the example from Yes, Minister in section 1, we might say that the main difference between the English source text and the Catalan version is that, although the content and the references are the same in both passages, it is very difficult to grasp the parodic nature of the translation. Mr Town Hall and Mr Whitehall are rendered flatly as “you are now in charge of local administration

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