University of Rome

1
University of Rome Tor VergataMA IN
LITERARY TRANSLATIONFour lessons onLANGUAGE,
CULTURE AND CREATIVITYIN LITERARY
TRANSLATION28th February, 2nd March, 16th-17
March 2007

• Lesson 4
• Humour feeling and culture

Sara Laviosa University of Bari,
Italy saralaviosa_at_hotmail.com
2

• per sei anni ha solo tradotto.
• E così ho imparato davvero a scrivere. Perché
  nessuna frase ha un significato univoco in tutte
  le lingue per tradurla devi scegliere ogni
  singola parola, ricreare le stesse sensazioni per
  una cultura diversa. Un lavoro faticoso,
  sprezzato, mal pagato. Ma un esercizio
  insostituibile. Paradossalmente, traducendo i
  grandi ho smesso di riflettarli nei miei romanzi
  e ho trovato il mio stile.
• From an interview given by Javier Marías, ?
  Antonella Barina, Il Venerdì della Repubblica,
  No. 900, 17.06.05.

3
Module aim

• to show how Javier Marías insight into the
  nature of literary translation from the point of
  view of the author-translator is also relevant to
  the activity of the translator-translator, with
  particular reference to the translation of humour
  and metaphor

4
Module contents

• humour feeling and culture
• humour translation in romantic comedy, popular
  fiction and literary fiction
• the translation of wordplay in film comedy
• the translation of metaphor in childrens
  literature and lyrics (poems and songs)

5
Contents of lesson 1

• definition of language, culture, creativity and
  literary translation
• the humour feeling
• humour translation in romantic comedy

6
Anyone who asks What is a language?

• must expect to be treated with the same suspicion
  as the traveller who inquires of the other
  passengers waiting on platform 1 whether they can
  tell him the way to the railway station The
  language user already has the only concept of a
  language worth having. (Harris 1980 1-3, in
  Graddol, Cheshire and Swann 1994 1)

7

• as the object of study of linguistics, language
  can refer to the general human capacity of verbal
  communication or it can refer to specific forms
  of language , for example English, Italian,
  French, etc.

8
What is culture?

• very broadly, culture refers to the entire way
  of life of people, including their patterns of
  thinking and behaving, their values and beliefs,
  their codes of conduct, the political, economical
  and commercial arrangements under which they live
  (Hatch 1985 178, in Malmkjær 2005 36)

9
language is essentially rooted in the reality
of culture (Malinowski 1938 305, in Katan
2004 99)

• most linguists, philosophers and social
  scientists agree that there are close links
  between the language a person speaks, the
  persons culture and the persons understanding
  of the world around them. A great deal of our
  practical, historical, cultural and social
  knowledge is acquired by means of language, and
  the world around us is to a very large extent
  categorised and labelled for us in the course of
  our language acquisition and learning processes
  (Malmkjær 2005 42)

10
Language, culture and translation

• it is commonplace in translation studies that
  translators need to be well versed not only in
  their languages but also in the cultures within
  which the languages are spoken this is because
  aspects of culture shape aspects of texts, are
  reflected in aspects of texts and are also in
  turn affected by texts (Malmkjær 2005 36)

11
Creativity

• according to the linguist Noam Chomsky (1957, in
  Hoey 2005 153) creativity is a fundamental
  property of language, any native speaker has the
  ability to produce utterances that are novel
• the literary sense of creativity refers to
  original texts that refresh the language and
  force us to think and see things in new ways
  (Hoey 2005 153)
• another sense of creativity refers to sentences
  that make no claim to be literary but which
  surprise us in some way, whether because of their
  incongruity, humour, wordplay or simple oddness
  (Carter 2004 Hoey 2005 153 169)

12
Literary translation

• Literary translation is an original subjective
  activity at the centre of a complex network of
  social and cultural practices (Bush 1998 127)
• A literal translator is bilingual and bicultural
  and thus inhabits a landscape which is not mapped
  by conventional geographies s/he is at home in
  the flux that is the reality of contemporary
  culture, where migration is constant across
  artificial political boundaries (ibid.)

13
Literary translation and creativity

• literary transltion is an exercise in
  self-expression. It offers the translator the
  opportunity to write his response to a text, to
  embody an experience of reading (rather than to
  communicate an interpretation), and to transform
  the text to his own voice (Scott 2000 xi)

14
Humour

• humour is whatever has a humorous effect when a
  person laughs, smiles or has a more general
  experience of humour (or humour feeling), we have
  humour (Kerbrat-Orecchioni 1981 in Vandaele 2002
  153)

15
Humour translation

• humour translation is different from other types
  of translation for the following reasons
  (Vandaele 2000 150)
• humour as a meaning effect has an undeniable,
  exteriorized manifestation, e.g. laughter or
  smiling
• the comprehension of humour (and its
  appreciation) and humour production are two
  distinct skills
• the appreciation of humour varies individually
• the rhetorical effect of humour on translators
  may be so overwhelming that it blurs the
  specifics of its creation strong emotions may
  hinder rationalization

16
Translating humour

• it consists in writing a target text capable of
  arousing the same or similar humour feeling
  aroused by the source text
• humour feeling refers to any sort of positive
  feeling or response to a successful instance of
  humour (Vandaele 2002 151)
• translators must account for the (con)textual
  causes of humour and the further effects that
  humour itself causes (Vandaele 2002 153-154)