TRAJAN SHIPLEY YOUNG

Universidad Autónoma de Madrid

Towards a humour translation check-list for students of translation

Traducción / Translation

If, as some theories suggest, humour comprehension and production are intuitive and talent-related, the challenges posed to translation students confronting a humorous text are myriad and complex. If translation students, (or for that matter, translators) cannot comprehend a humorous text, how can they possibly reproduce it? This paper intends to introduce emerging translators to the interdisciplinary field of humour translation and provide them with a prototype of a checklist for the translation of humorous texts. Essential to this task is a brief introduction to the most relevant theory of humour translation: Salvatore Attardo’s adaption of the General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) for translation, which consists of seven Knowledge Resources. To those resources, the author has added four extralinguistic resources, which take into account factors which may lie outside both the source and target texts. With this theoretical underpinning, and checklist in hand, students are asked to test the utility of the checklist through sample translations of humorous texts, in this case, cartoons. It is hoped that future translators will not only find this tool useful, but that they might also be encouraged to investigate further the rich and challenging field of humour translation.



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