Humour in translation

Words that are homonymic, paronymic, alliterative or rhyming, or metalinguistic devices of language can be used to produce humour. Also, wordplay which includes the use of puns, one liners, limericks, witticisms, among various others, can be another way to produce humour.[5]

For example, these are some funny translations done by machine translators:

• In the office of a doctor in Rome: Specialist in women and other diseases.
• In a Japanese hotel: You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.
• In a Norwegian cocktail lounge: Ladies are requested not to have children in the bar.

Humour can result from the interlocutor's inability to understand homonyms, homographs or semantically related synonym words. Similarly, words with superordinate and subordinate relationships are confused.

Overlapping semantics are difficult to distinguish, especially in translation. Words with multiple meanings (polysemous words) are mostly untranslatable, especially if they contain many connotations. Confusion of sense relations can also result because of semantic overlap. Confusion of sense relations in the set includes the improper use of superonym for hyponym, hyponym for superonym, a whole word for a partial word, a partial word for a whole word, antonym, confusion of co-hyponyms, and misuse of near-synonyms.[6]

An example of semantic overlap found in a golf course:

"ANY PERSONS (EXCEPT PLAYERS) CAUGHT COLLECTING GOLF BALLS ON THIS COURSE WILL BE PROSECUTED AND HAVE THEIR BALLS REMOVED" [7]

The interlocutor's erroneous choice of word removed instead of confiscated results in accidental humor in the context as shown in the example above. Semantically, removed is a commonly used word to express the action ‘take away’ and both are related in terms of sense. Removed thus may be used as a superordinate form that includes the action of taking away. The humorous aspect of this situation is intensified with the strong use of word removed in the phrase have their balls removed, relates to the sexual innuendo of castration instead of the much less extreme action of confiscation. With the overlapping of semantics, the intended message is thus misinterpreted and accidental humor is resulted.

Lexico-semantic clusterings can result in paradigmatic errors. It reflects the relations between related words and expressions, which is mainly of paradigmatic relations. The humor above is triggered by the translated text consisting of a script-switch trigger, which then results in the double reading. The irony is not lost in the contexts provided.

In machine translation from Chinese to English the phrase "Fuck the certain price of goods" has become proverbial for absurd machine mistranslations.[8] That text was on a Chinese / English bilingual sign in a supermarket and should have read "Dry goods department". The Simplified Chinese character 干 (link: 干) can mean "do" and "dry" and "fuck".

Lexical gaps concerns words or phrases with no direct translation in any given language.

Humor, then, results from the interlocutor's inability to grasp the lexical gaps in target language and linguistic representations may either be over generalised or under generalised to the point of absurdity.

The humour comes from the translator filling in an English lexical gap based on the lexical noun, "miss" by adding a prefix mis-. English employs the two verbs miss the carriage and miscarriages to mean vastly different actions. There is a lexical gap in English because the action of missing a carriage cannot be expressed with the same import and the same economy of verbalisation. The misuse of this lexical gap and overgeneralisation conflates the ludicrous idea of the horse-driven tours with no miscarriages.

From the example above, the interlocutor did not understand English derivations of ‘doer’ nouns such as, specialist, or suppletion such as, experts and mistakenly uses the derivational pattern to coin a lexeme from method. Accidental humour ensues as a result of the same word coinciding with the unlikely homophone Methodist, which refers to the Christian religious denomination, creating a ridiculous situation in the context of dentistry.[11]

An American slogan for Salem cigarettes was, "Salem - Feeling Free,". When translated for marketing in the Japanese market, it means, "When smoking Salem, you feel so refreshed that your mind seems to be free and empty".[12] This is an example of the translator trying to fill in the connotations of the lexical unit "free", perhaps because of limited vocabulary competency and thus resulting in an intralingual error. In this case there are actually Japanese terms equivalent to the adjective, "free" ( e.g. : 自由な).

All being said, languages do have a productive (linguistics) and recursion property that can also allow words and phrases to combine creatively to fill in the lexical gaps.

For example, Telugu expressions above can seem nearly impossible to translate. But with the usage of English to translate and establish the context, the meanings of the expression can be derived to be understandable.

In some cases, incidental humor is produced when interlocutors erroneously uses lexemes based on vague morpho-phonological similarity to the target word.

Japan's second-largest tourist agency was rather bewildered when it initially entered English markets and began receiving overwhelming requests for sexual tours. When they finally realized it, Kinki Nippon Tourist Company decided to change its name.[14]

An interesting and amusing example would be the pronunciation of English words with Chinese translatability by actor Xiao Xiao Bin in the 2010 comedy-martial arts film Just Call Me Nobody:

(1) [Yes] → 爷死 /ji̯ɛ sɨ/ ‘Grandpa dies’
(2) [Nice]→ 奶死 /naɪ̯ sɨ/ ‘Grandma dies’
(3) [Bus] →爸死 /bɑ sɨ/ ‘Dad dies’
(4) [Knees] →你死 /ni sɨ/ ‘You die’
(5) [Was]→ 我死 /wu̯ɔ sɨ/‘I die’
(6) [Does] →都死 /tɤʊ̯ sɨ/ ‘All die’
(7) [One dollar] → "完蛋了 /wu̯an tan lɯ̯ʌ/ ‘It’s over’

The examples from (1) to (7) illustrates the complete loss of the original meaning of the English words. Though the English pronounced sounds almost phonetically correct, the pronunciation is easily translatable to a Chinese lexeme of a depressing meaning (e.g. : ‘All die’). With the juxtaposition of the intended and accidental meaning with the cheerful pragmatics of the film, the translation becomes a hilariously erroneous one.

Misspelled words can be portrayed as the most basic level of inducing unintentional humor that occur in all translations, especially in signs or restaurants' menus. The ability to create humor out of misspelled words in translations happens particularly when the lexical items in a phrase or sentence are very well-known and common to English speakers but in a particular context, the lexical items appears to possess a totally different meaning that could be inappropriate at times.[15]

(1) dumplings written as dumpings 
(2) discount written as discunt  
(3) coke written as cock
(4) crab written as crap 
(5) shitting written as shiting  
(6) pond written as porn
(7) lunch written as launch  
(8) footwear written as foodwear 
(9) bedsheet written as bedshit 
(10) tested written as tasted in a hospital's sign "diagnostic for blood, urine, semen, stool and pregnancy, etc are tasted here." 

All these examples clearly show how inadvertent spelling of words can give rise to humorous transcriptions to anyone who possess a fair flair of English. In examples (4-6, 8, 9), ‘crap’, ‘shiting’, ‘porn’, ‘food’, ‘shit’ were blatantly misspelled by the translators in a way that they all share the same phonological but a complete different semantics form of another already existing pejorative word in English; ‘crab’, ‘shitting’, ‘pond’, ‘foot’ and ‘sheet’ respectively. Thus, all these examples produce unexpected smutty farce-comedy for readers, where humour seeps in as a natural corollary of this linguistic coincidence. Innocuous as the spelling mistakes may seem, the examples above (1-3, 7, 10) were also misspelled to other words that have a total different meanings as the intended words. ‘Dumping’ means the act of removing waste or garbage and it was associated with a food - ‘dumplings’. Likewise, ‘footwear’, which is worn on your foot, is written as ‘food-wear’. Additionally, ‘discount’ is written as ‘dis-cunt’ whereby cunt is an obscene word. Lastly, ‘tested’ and ‘tasted’ have a complete distinct meanings. ‘Tested’ means to identify or characterize a substance or constituents whereas ‘tasted’ means to sense the flavor of something. Thus in the case of example 10, humour not only springs from the misspelled word ‘tasted’ but is also accidentally heightened by the existence of the phrase ‘diagnostic for blood, urine, semen, stool and pregnancy’, which creates a state of intolerable linguistic redundancy. Hence, in these ways, misspelling can give a tantalising feeling of amusement to readers.[16]

Using the wrong reference may change the translator's intended meaning and led to multiple comical interpretations for the readers, thus, producing various humorous scripts. For example,

(1) A sign in a Chinese Safari Park states "大象在此 请留在车上 Elephants Here Please Stay In Your Car"

The translator intended to refer the general public that are visiting the park as the implicit reference marker of the sign by using the co-referential anaphor 'Your', but failed to do so and instead, the explicit anaphor 'Your' unintentionally picks up 'Elephants' as the textual referent. Thus, this give rise to a humorous script that looks as though that the sign is meant for the elephants and not the people. In addition, this example highlights the importance of having punctuation to serve as a cohesion device because if the translator were to put a full stop or exclamation point after the word 'Elephants', the anaphor 'your' would have been interpreted literally for the readers. Therefore, it would have also ruled out any possibilities of humorous reading.

(2) An article in Soviet Weekly reports "There will be a Moscow Exhibition of Arts by 15,000 Soviet Republic painters and sculptors. These were executed over the past two years."

Similarly, there is a mishap of the anaphoric reference marker 'these', which to the interpretation of readers, refers to 'Soviet Republic painters and sculptors'. Thus, it conveys the idea that they were only executed over the past two years, as a result, generating laughter among readers. In terms of the translator's intentions, the reference marker 'these' actually refers textually to the referent 'Arts' or, perhaps, 'the painters and sculptors' works' and not 'Soviet Republic painters and sculptors'. Hence, this script lacks of an eligible textual referent to accurately bring across the intended message. Although this script is easily decipherable based upon one's basic knowledge, it still did not fail to cause laughter and humor to readers.[17]

Word order is the way in which syntactic constituents of a language arrange itself in a phrase or a sentence. Different languages employ different structures of word order. Direct translation of one language to another may result in wrong placement of a phrase in relation to the other constituents in the sentence. This may cause a change to the initial meaning of the translator and hence, may trigger a humorous script.

Because of to the incorrect placement of the adverbial phrase ‘daily except Thursday’ at the end of the sentence, this script generates unintentional humor in its translation. The adverbial phrase ‘daily except Thursday’ became a post-modifier which had misguided the readers into thinking that the script is about the act of burying ‘famous Russian and Soviet composers, artists and writers’, instead of conveying the act of people visiting the cemetery. Apparently, the translator wanted to avoid a possible awkwardness of phrasing the post-modifier after the appropriate act, but was unaware that the parentheses applied would also enclose another awkward and comical adverbial at the same time.

Likewise, the humour in this case is also caused by the wrong placement of the prepositional phrase ‘with nuts’ as a post-modifier of ‘the ladies’ instead of its intended referent ‘cocktails’ as a post-modifier. Although the mishap is triggered by the mistaken word order, which can be changed to "Special cocktails with nuts for the ladies", it would still have remained as an awkward sentence because of the polysemous word ‘nuts’. Thus, if the word ‘nuts’ were to be replaced with ‘cashews’, any humorous translation error would not have been present. Therefore, attachment sites of prepositional phrases are a notorious source of ambiguity in English.[18]