As anyone who’s been following my blog for a while surely knows, I love puns and bad dad jokes (often the same thing). And I often use them in my work, especially in my children’s books. Which becomes rather problematic when translating them into Greek. How can someone translate puns decently?
Rick van Mechelen, aka “that translation student“, recently shared an interesting post on this very subject. He cites Dirk Delabastita 1996 work* to divide puns into four categories of ambiguity. These are homonymy, homophony, homography, and paronymy, each of which is better suited to different forms of communication:
Category | Definition | Example |
Homonymy | A pun where a word with multiple meanings is used to give multiple meanings at once. | A hard-boiled egg in the morning is hard to beat. |
Homophony | A pun using two words that sound identical, but have different spellings. | ‘Mine is a long and a sad tale! said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail; ‘but why do you call it sad?’ |
Homography | A pun using a word with multiple meanings, but different pronunciations for those meanings | You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless you play bass. |
Paronymy | A pun using two words with similar, but not identical spellings and pronunciations. | A skunk fell into a river and stank to the bottom |
Rick then goes on to point out that translating puns can cause several difficulties because most puns are specific to their own language. A pun that works in Dutch most likely won’t work in English and the other way around. Exceptions to this are puns using loanwords from the language you’re translating to, but realistically, you won’t see many of those.
When translating puns, there are a lot of factors to keep in mind. We need to know where the ambiguity lies and how it’s used in the source language. We also need to keep the topic of the dialogue or text in mind, as a pun about bananas in a text about monkeys makes sense, but a pun about bananas in a text about fish won’t work at all.
Thirdly, don’t use overly complicated puns. A pun should add humor to a sentence, without becoming the focal point of said sentence. This means that the puns need to be easy to understand and make sense to the reader.
Like every translation, we need to keep in mind what we’re translating for. If it’s a book, we can use more words to get our pun across, but in the case of subtitling, we have a limited amount of time and space to make the pun.
The most important factor is also the most straight-forward one: Don’t try too hard. If you can use a pun in the translation without too much effort, that’s great! If you can’t, don’t worry about it. Sometimes the situation just doesn’t work with a pun in your translation, so then just leave it out, or compensate by adding a small pun later in the translation.
Pun translation is often one of the most difficult parts of translating media, but it can also be the most fun part. There are only a few other situations in which you get to go so deep into the language, and you’re guaranteed to learn something new every time.
And if you’re stuck for a pun, you can always try the pun generator!
* Delabastita, Dirk, and André Lefevere. 1996. Wordplay and Translation: Special Issue, Dedicated to the Memory of André Lefevere (1945-1996). Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.
Rick van Mechelen said:
Thank you so much for linking to my post! The pun you gave as an example is a great example of one that’s difficult to translate, because it uses an idiom not many other languages have. “When life gives you melons, you’re dyslexic” is therefore really hard to translate to any of the languages I know, so honestly wouldn’t know how to translate it, maybe I’ll write another post on pun translation soon and give it a go!
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thanks for a great post, Rick! It was a pleasure to share 🙂
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gibsonauthor said:
Reblogged this on s a gibson.
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The Story Reading Ape said:
Reblogged this on Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog.
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Stine Writing said:
My cousin is one of the ultimate best at puns. He can come up with one for every situation!
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Now I’m jealous. I wish I had that gift!!
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Stine Writing said:
Yeah, I thought I was good and I openly admit he puts me to shame!
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Carl D'Agostino said:
I remember taking Shakespeare in college and the professor explained the many puns used. Most all would have gone right over our heads without the explanations.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
That’s another problem with puns (and, often, humor in general): they’re highly relevant to their individual societies because they depend so much on cultural references.
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beetleypete said:
I often feel puns are a very ‘British’ thing. It never occurred to me that they might work in other languages. 🙂
Best wishes, Pete.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
I do believe that the Brits have perfected the form 🙂
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Rick van Mechelen said:
The Brits are definitely masters of puns and wordplay, but many languages often seen as “humorless” are surprisingly good at them as well, like German and Japanese!
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beetleypete said:
Good to know! 🙂
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wilfredbooks said:
If I knew a foreign language well enough to be able to create well-received puns, I’d feel I had mastered it! My first foreign language is German, and the people are far from humourless as is often perceived, but it tends to be a different humour from the British, so a very deep knowledge of all aspects of the language is required to understand what tickles them: my attempts at humour would inevitably be in the British idiom, and would probably misfire! This is a very useful reference for the different categories of pun, so thanks Nicholas. Cheers, Jon.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Thank you, Jon! I’m so glad you enjoyed it 😀
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V.M.Sang said:
Interesting to consider the problems of translators when dealing with puns. It must be a really difficult thing to translate.
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Rick van Mechelen said:
It is a very difficult thing to translate, but so satisfying when you can finally make it work!
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
It really is!!
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Don Massenzio said:
Reblogged this on Author Don Massenzio and commented:
Check out this interesting post from Nicholas Rossis on Translating Puns
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Staci Troilo said:
This kind of humor is popular in my family. I never considered how difficult is is to convey the humorous connotations in different languages until my daughter got engaged to a Peruvian boy. Really great info here, Nicholas.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
Oh, it must be quite a challenge translating puns into Spanish 😀
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Staci Troilo said:
I can’t do it. My daughter is getting pretty good at the language. We’re lucky her fiancé speaks fluent English. Even so, puns are difficult. But that difficulty sometimes adds to the humor.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
I usually end up rewriting most jokes from scratch when translating my children’s books into Greek. Anyone who speaks both languages will see completely different jokes depending on the language!
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Staci Troilo said:
That’s a good option. I wish I was fluent in two languages so I could compare versions like that. Or write my own!
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Michelle Morrison said:
This is interesting. Translating can be tricky, especially with something like a pun that can be language specific.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
It can be an absolute nightmare 😀
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TanGental said:
My favourite, I suppose because I’ve been besotted since I was a child is in Tintin. In Herge’s original the hapless detective twins are Dupont et Dupond, which sound the same but are different so wouldn’t be twins if read but are when spoken – sorry if I’m labouring this. In the English translation they are Thomson and Thompson. Same play in that the sounds are the same but the spelling different… lovely post Nick.
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Nicholas C. Rossis said:
That’s a great example! Thanks 🙂
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