Humour and Translation, an interdiscipline

3. Traditional approaches to translation 
Before we move forward let’s take a step back and look at what is usually 
prioritised in translation. Common sense, and even common practice, tells us that 
translation is about being faithful to the words, the meaning, the contents, the 
intention, the effect of a text. So the common practice and general rule, when it 
comes to translating humor, could be summed up as “translate the words and/or 
the contents and then keep your fingers crossed and hope that the humor will 
somehow come across with the rest”. To the extent that this formula quite 
frequently fails to work, many experts reach the rather hasty conclusion that 
humor is untranslatable, although they may differ on the degree or the 
circumstances of untranslatability (see Delabastita 1994, for the issue of 
translatablity). The translatability of humor could be a vital component of the 
common ground shared by translation and humor studies. 

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Humor and translation 
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The fact is that a joke (as an instance of humor, though not the only one, as many 
are quick to point out) can be told in lots of different ways, so where does that 
leave such a fearful respect for preserving the words? The point of a joke is often 
far removed from its semantic value, so where does that leave the importance of 
meaning and contents, and what is one to do about non-sense humor? A text 
might resort to humor as a means of making the author’s intention clearer or more 
effective, but what do we do if humor is detrimental to the author’s goals in the 
new environment of the translated version? If, on the other hand, humor is the 
goal of the text (as in comedy) or social intercourse (breaking ice, gaining trust, 
salesmanship), what is the point in translating the contents if the humor is made to 
disappear in the process? What translators need is an awareness of the nature of 
humor and its relative importance in different contexts. Nevertheless, our 
commitment to humor should not lead us to prioritise it in situations where it may 
have to be sacrificed to some extent to allow for a satisfactory rendering of other 
textual items that are actually more important.
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