Humour and Translation, an interdiscipline

part of a game, entertainment, educational, mind-teaser, tongue-twister; 
mnemonic. 
Example 5 
I’m not a pheasant plucker, I’m a pheasant plucker’s son; 
I’m only plucking pheasants ’till the pheasant plucker comes. 
• 
Verbal and non-verbal combined, or iconic representation of idiom and 
metaphor. 
A further consideration in translating humor is related to the fact that humor, like 
most aspects of human communication, can be produced by verbal or non-verbal 
means, or by various combinations of the two (see Hammond and Hughes 1978; 
for a study in visual punning). People tend to think of translation as pertaining 
exclusively to the verbal domain, but even if this were true for translators they 
still often have to compensate for culturally bound meanings that are expressed 
non-verbally in the source text and would lead to considerable gaps in the 
communication if not accounted for somehow. Comic books, films and television 
readily come to mind as illustrations of this challenge. See figure 2 for an example 
of how this can be incorporated into a model of humor translation. 
• 
The forms of humor (& contrastive studies) 
Translating is to a large degree a decision-making process, and much of this 
involves deciding what to do with the form of expression and how it relates to the 
author’s underlying intentions and reasons for choosing one form over another. 
We also know that form and performance (the packaging and delivery) are key 
components of the potential success of humor. Sometimes a change of scenery 
(i.e. moving the text to a different country) will require a change of form, but any 
strategy has to be carefully thought out since it is easy to change for change sake 
with no real gain involved. In talking about form I am referring to rhetorical 
devices such as: irony, paradox, contradiction; parody, caricature, imitation; 

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Humor and translation 
14 
hyperbole, understatement; analogy, simile, metaphor, definition; joke/comic 
formulae (structures, codes, patterns, performance-styles).