There are some reasons to state that humour is highly charged for artistic and athletic forms of the original text and belongs to the elements of the prime importance. Humour (a means of creating subjective modality) is a form of the author’s appraisal opinion.
Practically in modern English and American prose humour is expanded to a particular way of world perception. Thus, this phenomenon is of great significance provided a translator tries to gain an adequate translation.
Humour is the usage of language units in contrastive environment in which they acquire figurative meaning. It gives a ground for an addressee to get the implicit information (in our case – humour). It is the context that serves a humour marker.
These factors objectivize the definition of humour: humour is the actualization of words in an ambiguous context to express something, opposite to their initial meanings with the purpose to achieve a funny, amusing effect.
Nothing is serious except passion. The Intellect is not a serious thing, and never has been. It is an instrument on which one plays, that is all. The only serious form of intellect I know is the British intellect; the illiterares play the drum [Wilde].
Thus by humour we understand something which arouses amusement, laughter (the capacity of recognizing, reacting and expressing something which is amusing, funny). Humour brings a deep and mutual understanding. Humour is the form of paradox, which is good, great and unexpected at the same time.
You will never write a good book until you have some bad ones [Shaw, 140].
The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on [Wilde, 99].
Humour presupposes a highly developed intellect and can only exist within the framework of specific sociolinguistic conditions. The most important property of it is a love of the mother tongue, athletic pleasure derived from its use [Pocheptsov 1981:11].
The problem of translation of humour has been paid little attention to until now. It is great and significant. The loss of humour in translation can lead to the loss of information, of the author’s styles, make his work of literature in a target language uninteresting and faked.
It is common knowledge that there exits situational and linguistic humour. Situational humour is usually relized in some sentences within the context that rarely exceeds a paragraph. Situational humour often appears to be grounded on the discrepance of an outward characteristic of an object and the nature of that object.
-There is a man outside with a wooden leg, Mr.Swith.
-What’s the name of his other leg [Pocheptsov, 286].
With linguistic humour the figurative meaning is relized gradually in a board context 9in some paragraphs, short story). Humour should remain in a target language text. The loss of it can tell on its coherence and the main idea.
-“Yes, she’s married to a real estate agent and a good honest fellow, too.”
-“My gracious, Bigamy?” [Pocheptsov, 285].
Situational humour is recognized immediately. With the situational humour the contrast between meanings played upon is quite vivid. With associative humour the figurative meaning is relized gradually in a board context (in some paragraphs, story). If situational humour serves to create vivid details, sketches, associateive humour is very significant in the target language text. The loss of it can violate coherence and the main message of OT.
While rendering the stylistic effect a translator must follow the principle of creativeness, analogy to provoke the adequate reaction on the part of a reader. With great efforts a translator gains his aim, resorting to different language means. A translator isn’t expected to preserve a stylistic device, but he is supposed to reproduce its function in the target text. A translator should try to keep the effect of the stylistic device on a reader primarily. Thus, one can hardly transform a stylistic device from a source language into a target language, but humour effect is always welcome.
The diversity of languages, their structures and systems presupposed the variety of translation. Transformations (both lexical and grammatical) are at work to convert language units of a source language into target language units. Transformations work with humour too. Humour is being rendered at the deep structure level for the surface structure adequacy may fail here due to social and linguistic divergency of source and target languages.
When a woman marries again it is because she detested her first husband. When a man marries it is because he adored his first wife. Women try their luck, men risk theirs [Wilde, 293].
As an aesthetic-thinking category humour is subtle, evasive and extremely difficult to describe. Humour has some fundamental principles worth mentioning. It works within the framework of specific socio-linguistic conditions. Selective nature of humour is observed in both authorized and unauthorized humorous texts [Кобякова 1986]. Comprehension of humour depends not only on the quality of the jokes, their witticism but also on the quality of the recipient, his sense of humour. Authorized humour is based mostly on play of thoughts, concepts and previous experience.
Man weeps to think that he will die soon. Woman that she was born so long ago [Mencken, 92].
Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent [Swift, 139].
Duty is what one expects from others [Wilde, 88].
In unauthorized humorous text more preferable is the play on words, situations. These texts are of diverse nature – both of statements narration (a) and dialogues (b):
- The weather forecaster hadn’t been right in three months, and his resignation caused little surprise. His alibi, however, pleased the city council. “I can’t stand this town any longer,” read his note. “The climate doesn’t agree with me “ [Pocheptsov, 155].
- Teacher – “When was Rome built?”
Percy – “At night”.
Teacher – “Who told you that?”
Percy – “You did. You said Rome wasn’t built in a day” [Pocheptsov, 276].
What matters much is the descriptive translation of an original text. A lexical unit of a source text may be exchanged by a word / word combination in TT. Humour is hidden; it lies deep in a language structure. That is why equivalent translation doesn’t always work humour-like. It may go alongside with descriptive one, as a team.
The best cure for insomnia is to get a lot of sleep [Fields, 33].
Кращі ліки від безсоння – спати досхочу.
California is a fine place to live – if you happen to be orange.
Каліфорнія – це гарне місце для життя, якщо ви – помаранч.
Here the translation is adequate, because 1) insomnia is a well-known disease; 2) California is widely popular around the world. There is no need in explaining describing them. Thus humour should be rendered in translation adequately and faithfully.
The translator’s activities extend far beyond translation itself. Translator’s task is not only to convey the meaning, the thoughts of the author but also to keep intact the laws of both languages [Швачко 2001]. The process of rendering consists in creating linguo-cultural equality of ST and TT. The translation is bilateral i.e. interlingual and intercultural. The aim of any rendering is to reach adequacy. To make a text suitable in terms of the target language is to preserve peculiarities of the author’s style and literature genre into that [Швако 2001].
The research of linguistic mechanism of humour enables the analyst to discover many relevant features of language structure and meaning overlooked in previous researches and to give a new assessment to linguistic facts.
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