The amateur translation of humour on the basis of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

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The amateur translation of humour on the basis of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski

Thesis presented in part fulfilment of the requirements

for the degree of Bachelor of Arts in Philology - Applied Linguistics

at the Tischner European University in Kraków

Maciej Saj

Kraków 2013



Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Humour and the idiosyncrasy of wordplay translation

1.1 Concept of humour

1.2 Devices of humour

1.3 Victims of humour

1.4 Types of jokes

1.5 Wordplay, puns and its categories 11

1.6 Irony

1.7 Problems with humour translation

Chapter 2. Analysis of humour in The Witcher books by A. Sapkowski

2.1 Corpus features

2.2 Quantitative analysis

2.3 Qualitative analysis

2.3.1 Translation of pun into another pun

2.3.2 Wanting translation of humour

2.3.3 Untranslatable humour

2.3.4 Proper reproduction of a pun

Conclusion

Bibliography

Appendix



Introduction

The aim of the present thesis will be to analyse the amateur translation of humour in the literature, on the basis of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski. The first chapter will discuss the notion of humour and multitude of its features. The second chapter of this paper will be dedicated to the analysis of the amateur translation of The Witcher made by anonymous translators from the Internet The Witcher fans forum.

The main motivation for writing this particular thesis was to answer a specific question. Is there a difference between a professional translator and a group of amateur translators? The answer might not sound that obvious, since a group of people is capable of doing a vast amount of work in much shorter time than a single translator. Of course, there is always a case of the level of an amateur translation. Lack of information about the translators cannot suggest anything. They might be professionals that are doing it for hobby or for pleasure or they might be as well people without any translational or even linguistic studies.

In the first chapter of the thesis, several concepts and aspects of humour will be based on the works by Attardo and van Limpt (2008). The next section will be devoted to the devices of humour in works by van Limpt (2008) and Kalaga (1997). Then, it will move on the victims of humour and the types of humour, which will be provided by Zabalbeascoa (2005). The next section will explain the wordplay, puns and their categories. This section will rest on the works by Ghanooni (2012), Gumul (2005) and Vandaele (2011). Irony will be the topic of the next section that will be investigated in the works by Mateo (1995) and van Limpt (2008). The last part of the first chapter will be devoted to the problem with translation. This specific section will be built on the works by Delabastita (1996) (cited in Ghanooni 2012), Kalaga (1997), Mateo (1995) and Olbrects-Tyteca (1974) (cited in Attardo 1994).

The second chapter will consist of three main parts. Corpus feature of this paper will contain information about the author of The Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski. Moreover, this section will provide information about the translators of the books, their motives and way of work. The subsequent section of this thesis called `Quantitative analysis' will describe the proportions of the several types of humour that were present in the analysed material. `Qualitative analysis' will be the last section of the second chapter of this paper. It will be devoted to the analysis of several examples of translation of humour from The Witcher. The source text and the target text will be compared in order to achieve a valuable analysis and assessment of the translation.

This paper will try to answer a certain stereotype of amateur translation. Should it be stigmatised as an unprofessional work that is imperfect or even botched? Do we need amateur translation when we have professionals, who are trained to translate properly? Of course there is a question of necessity of a translation. Amateur translation is prepared often when a text does not exist in the target language or it will be translated in the nearest future, but the fans do not want to wait for such a long time to read the destinies of their favourite characters. Is it forgivable to release an amateur translation of a book just because of these inducements? Can a professional translation be compared to the amateur one? Is it possible that a group of amateur translators will overcome a trained translator? The analysis in the second chapter of this thesis will try to answer these questions.

humour translation sapkowski pun



Chapter 1. Humour and the idiosyncrasy of wordplay translation

This chapter will present the concept of humour and several aspects that are closely related to the idea of humour, namely: concept of humour presented by vast amount of scholars, several humorous devices, most popular victims of humour, types of jokes, a brief description of wordplay and puns with several pun categories, a short section devoted to irony, and last, but not least, various problems with humour translation.

1.1 Concept of humour

Humour as a broad concept, should be properly presented in order to distinguish several definitions of humour provided by different scholars. It is almost impossible to define such a thing as humour, as it is an individual way of thinking that makes a person smile or laugh.

Linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists categorized humour as a blanket category, which covers multiple aspects such as a joke, a laughter or a feeling that something is funny (Attardo 1994). Chateau (1950) observes that humour ought to be opposite to seriousness and not to tragedy (cited in Attardo). In some cases, humour (or in this case, comedy) is defined, here by Gourevitch (1975), as “(…) a miscellaneous genre activated by plurality of impulses: farce, humor, satire, and irony” (cited in Attardo).

Aubouin (1948), tried to distinguish humour and the ridiculous by looking at its structural factors and by the absence of resolution of the latter (cited in Attardo 1994). Categorizing humour into subject matter (aggressive, scatological, sexual) was a point made by some psychologists focused on substantialist theory (Attardo 1994). Forabosco (1992) made an attempt to differentiate humour and incongruity as well as resolution, and humour only consisting incongruity.

Some of the researchers denied to distinguish humour into the categories mentioned anteriorly. Olbrechts-Tyteca (1974) denies the distinction proposed by Aubouin. To quote Eco (no date), “the category of comic does not seem to have a possibility of theoretical differentiation from that of humor”.

There are abundant dilemmas concerning the attempt to somehow put humour into a firm category, but there is a rather pessimistic approach that categorizing humour is possible. Because of the traditional lexical categories, some misleading beliefs, as noted by Jardon (1988), may arouse in reality, such as the evident distinction between comic and humour or the limitation of translatability of a certain terminology in Milner (1972) and Orlando (1987) views, for example in Freud's works, may result challenging as for the lack of the needed terminology. There is as well an incongruity from the position of psychologists and literary critics or the folklorists, as they state that “genres” are for example the joke, the tall tale etc., while psychologists noted the difference in manifesting what humour really is. In literature, there is a clear-cut usage of such terms as “comic” or “comedy”, which are commonly utilized as “plays of humorous content” or to be more general, this terms denote the literary works, which subject is humorous.

Lewis (1989) points out the difficulties in a situation when a certain point of view is made, based only on a one theory, excluding other research. What is interesting, Lewis himself ignored the essentialist theory and focused mainly on psychological, teleological, and sociological theory.

The Medieval medicine was the first so-called genre in which the researchers were able to date a term “humour”. Apparently, the complexity of the research proved to be a challenging task and because of that, several “semantic fields” were dedicated to establish the semantic field of “humour”, including being aware of the limits of the field.

There is a one collective criterion that bonds the definition of humour implicitly and explicitly: laughter. The simple assumption is that what make a person laugh is humorous, hence the assumption is considered symmetrical: “what is funny makes you laugh and what makes you laugh is funny”. Milner (1972) argues with that statement. Quoting Milner: “while humor is a very important element, it is only one out of a number of different detonators of laughter”.

Van Limpt focuses on the work of Raskin (1985) and tries to slowly, step by step, reveal his concepts. Humour is considered to be universal. People will not laugh exactly at the some jokes, but the whole notion of laugh and humour is known for all people, as Raskin (1985) explains that all people “are capable of findings things funny and laughing at them”. Raskin with the help of Freud, mentions several factors that accompany humour: “being in a good mood, warning the hearer that a joke is coming, getting the joke right away, being able to distance oneself from the humorous situation”.

According to van Limpt (2008), readers of Bryson's literature are cheery and prepared to have a laugh. Furthermore, they are not willing to be offended or to take a joke personally as well as they will not be thinking about a double meaning of a joke. Van Limpt describes this kind of reader as “enjoying a cool glass of iced tea in a sunny, green garden in the middle of a long summer holiday”.

Raskin (1985) distinguished and classified various kinds of humour: ridicule, deliberate ridicule, affectionate ridicule, humour at the speaker's own expense, self_disparaging humour, riddles, conundrums and puns, and suppression/repression humour.

Raskin points out the three main categories that exist in the theory of humour. The cognitive-perceptual is related to inconsistency. This theory is based on the assumption that every joke is partly true and in some cases, they oppose each other. However, as Raskin defines it: “the two incongruent components are somehow brought together, synthesized, made similar”.

Next class of humour is based on the social-behavioural theory that is attached to the notion of discredit. In this group, the theorists consider humour to be hostile, laden with malice, aggression and superiority as laughter comes from hostility. It is incredibly difficult to unlearn laughing at someone's faults, drawbacks etc.

The third theory is a research theory, or sometimes called a psychoanalytical branch. The main point in this theory is that humour helps people to reduce the tension and stress. In addition to that, humour also gives a sense of freedom and brings relief from the constant state of being under pressure.

In the next subsection, a brief part will be devoted to the conditions that have to be fulfilled in order to say that humour is “working” in the works by van Limpt and Kalaga.

1.2 Devices of humour

Raskin (1985) presents six parameters necessary for humour to “work”:

1. at least one human participant, but usually two or more (speaker/hearer);

2. something needs to happen (stimulus);

3. a hearer with sufficient life experience to get the humour act (experience);

4. a hearer who is open to humour (psychology). This parameter is possibly linked with experience;

5. “a certain physical environment” (situation);

6. the right audience, i.e. people from a similar background and culture (society). (Raskin 4-5)

As Raskin observed a humours situation has to meet all of the criteria mentioned above. If one or two of the conditions are negative, the humorous situation will prove to be unfunny.

The role of a subject in humour cannot be treated individually, therefore it has to be regarded in a sociological and cultural context of a belonging to a certain group with all its common ideology, beliefs, signs, codes and hierarchy. According to Kalaga, the approval of the social models by laugh is a common case in the society, thus lack of laugh signifies the denial of the society to accept a certain situation and behaviour. The sociological and cultural context not only determines the individual aspect, but also affects the qualitative defining of humour, making of it a changeable, paradigmatic phenomenon that depends on the hierarchy of values in the exact moment in the history and in the exact place of the cultural geography.

1.3 Victims of humour

In this subsection, the notion of victims and targets in a humorous texts will be analysed, on the basis of the work by Zabalbeascoa (2005).

We ought to associate a victim of humour with a certain person or group. Of course, in many cases that is the point of a pun or a joke, but not necessarily. The target of a joke may be common, abstract or related to human thoughts and emotions such as relationships, behaviour, ideals, war, health, death etc.. The targets may be even animals or technology; all of them in the end are used as a tool in order to criticize people. Change that is made from quoting to direct speech can be compared to the change of perspective and that is why, identity is a crucial part of a translation.

According to Zabalbeascoa (2005), the translator has to be aware of the choice of the victim in order to be able to translate the target-related joke for a foreign recipient. Playing with sympathy or antipathy towards the target of a joke is a common method used by a humourist to draw a picture of a victim in an arranged way. Zabalbeascoa refers to it as “humanizing vs. dehumanizing” attitude towards the victim, for example term racist is set to strike at dehumanizing a certain ethnic group or race.

1.4 Types of jokes

In this subsection, various type of jokes will be defined, including their characteristic features and some translational problems according to the work by.

Unrestricted, Inter-/bi-national

There are types of jokes that are culturally related and somehow similar, therefore it is an easy way for the translator to depict a certain joke in foreign environment. Shared tastes, knowledge and values are as well crucial to the appreciation of humour. A joke can be translated with ease, there are no cultural differences and moreover, a translator does not have to disturb himself with the fear of losing content, meaning or humour Zabalbeascoa.

Restricted by audience profile traits

This type of joke is specific. It requires some knowledge, familiarity or appreciation for a certain type of genre, comedy, humour. Zabalbeascoa suggests trying not to seek the differentiation between the languages, but to look for the knowledge to decode the message and make it clear for the target reader.

Intentionality

This point is problematic, as the distinction between the author's intention to achieve humour and the translator ability to see it. Another possibility is that the user will see something that the author missed or intended to omit e.g. translation errors or a funny coincidence that resulted in a humours situation. Unintended humour may be a side effect of a translation or a source text.

Improvisation

In many cases, humorous situation is spontaneous, which excessively increases the difficulty of translation. Sophistication of humour is a difficult task for a translator to grasp, as all the innuendo and shades of meaning are wittily set in the text.

Signals (of the intention to joke)

Omission of a certain joke, since a translator “didn't get it” or the joke has not been properly signalled in the text. When there is a case that the translation is less effective than the source text, a translator tries to emphasize humour in such a way that the source text becomes distorted. According to Zabalbeascoa, for example the source text is laden with irony and sarcasm and the translator in order to maintain humour, changes the register, broad brushes or even changes jokes on his own.

Private (or in-group) jokes

This type of joke is closely related to the issue of belonging to a certain group and community. Only members of the group, will be able to understand the joke, because of its distinctiveness.

Wordplay v. narrative (linguistic v. textual)

Zabalbeascoa explains here how a funny situation may suddenly and unexpectedly be a part of the story or plot, as well as how the wordplay (puns, limericks, witticism) is produced by humour. The former case is not considered problematic to translate, but translators who are really focused on the text “may not be able to see the forest (narrative twists and turns) through all the trees (words and sentences)”.

Target

The majority of jokes involves a target or a victim. Intellectual humour for example riddles or a childish type of humour such as toilet games are most often considered to be targetless jokes. There can be several victims of a joke, individuals or groups, ideas or common beliefs etc. As being commonly in-group related or metalinguistic, victimless humour is quite a challenge to translate it properly.

Meaning

Another hard issue to grasp in translation of jokes. Zabalbeascoa mentions that there is a variety of meaning related and non-related aspects. The latter are based on absurdity, symbolic meaning or surrealism. The former could be a distinction between single and double meaning jokes, usage of metaphorical meaning and ambiguity.

Optionality and familiarity (regarding theme, genre etc.)

Public speeches are in English-speaking countries definitely more common, thus the ability to use humour in a speech is much more appreciated and even expected. According to Zabalbeascoa, a translator has to define when and where such application of humour is needed or in which cases it is forbidden to include humour in a speech.

Taboo

To quote: “Taboo can either be an external factor or a component of humor”. The former case concerns the aspects of society such as sex, religion, bodily functions or dealing with “subjects of a light-hearted manner”. The latter case occurs when a taboo is itself a part of humour. The two kind of taboo may arise simultaneously.

Metalinguistic humour

Defines the metalinguistic humour as “its object its language, and its objective language awareness”. Then, he describes translation as a word game in which metalinguistic humour is a demanding riddle. The wordplay functions according to Zabalbeascoa are: phatic, image-enhancing; part of a game, entertainment, educational, mind-teaser, tongue twister; mnemonic.

Verbal and non-verbal combined, or iconic representation of idiom and metaphor

Humour, which is as well a part of human communication, is produced by two means: verbal and non-verbal that may in fact coexist and intertwine.

The forms of humour (and contrastive studies)

For Zabalbeascoa, translating is a constant battle for a translator over decisions that have to be made, such as choosing the correct expression, register, style or form. The translator has to justify his opinion and intention of choosing one form over the other. Every strategy and decision has to be though through, because of the consequences of that steps, for example moving a text to another country and culture.

1.5 Wordplay, puns and its categories

In this subsection, the emphasis will be put on the concept of a pun and wordplay, additionally several categories of a pun in the works by Vandaele, Ghanooni and Gumul will be mentioned.

A comprehensive definition of wordplay by Delabastita:

Wordplay is the general name for the various textual phenomena in which structural features of the language(s) are exploited in order to bring about a communicatively significant confrontation of two (or more) linguistic structures with more or less similar forms and more or less different meanings. (Delabastita 1996: 128)

Delabastita states that translators have to think over several textual functions of a pun in a text and in order to find an appropriate technique to translate them. The importance of the background knowledge is mentioned by Klitgard (2005), when he defines puns as not only textual items, but elements with contextual and ideological meaning, for instance in Joyce's literature: “Joyce's puns are not just verbal fun and games […] but form large unfamiliar and foreign patterns of strong political, ideological or ethical messages”. Vandaele claims that verbal humour (without mentioning the cultural context) is stretched from the easily translatable humour to the metalinguistic one.

According to Ghanooni (2012), the definition of pun is as follow: „A pun is a literary form whereby a portrayal of a word or a phrase has several meanings, all of which apply”. To achieve a pun, the same sound with a different spelling is needed or the same spelling with a different meaning. The result of this effect cause the reader to be consciously aware of the fact that there are some distinctions and affinities of the word or words. In that case,

a one particular sentence may have several various meanings.

The understanding of a pun, mostly depends on people's views on religion, sex, culture, worldview and time. The pun is created in such a way that both forms and meaning are perfectly understandable, which is a humorous and witty thing to do. People tend to use humour and irony when they communicate with other people. Especially, when the two speakers have the same background knowledge, a pun will be humorously received by the addressee.

Homographic pun creates ambiguity of the graphemic representation of words, which have a different meaning, while spelt in the same way (to wind vs. the wind).

Homonymic pun is related to words that are similar in pronunciation and spelling (to bear vs. a bear).

Homophobic pun uses words that are different in spelling, but the word pairs sound very much alike (tail vs. tale).

Paronymic pun is based on slight differentiation in both spelling and pronunciation; Delabastita (1993): “adding in salt/insult to injury”.

Cross-cultural translation may be a demanding task, especially, when the target reader is not familiar with the source culture, which is often the case. Puns are considered as “linguistic-bond phenomenon”, because of their affiliation to language in a specific environment. One strategy to translate puns, was to add footnotes in order to explain the message behind a pun.

There were some research concerning a fact whether wordplay is in fact translatable. Alexieva (1997) think of wordplay as a universal notion in all languages, because of the fact that nearly every language consist of words with similar oral and written form.

Translation of puns is regarded as an individual work of a translator, as it depends on the translator's taste, how to manage with a certain pun. The creativity is the most crucial part in the process of translating a pun.

Delabastita (1996b) observes that there is a paradox, where being faithful to the ST in wordplay, means being unfaithful to lexical and grammatical forms.

S³awiñska (1983) noted that puns are often based on wordplay and references to the British culture and customs.

According to Dictionary of Literary Terms, a wordplay is defined as a usage of the sound similarity between words in order to emphasize the ambiguity or the double meaning of the words as well as accentuating analogy and contrast. A wordplay can be realized in various semantic forms.

As Delabastita (1996) observed, puns are divided into horizontal and vertical. The former consists of two similarly or identically sounding elements, whereas in the latter, the wordplay is based on a single lexical unit. The closeness of the components emphasizes its semantic properties, which is characteristic of the horizontal type of wordplay. If it takes the vertical form, one of the components will remain default.

If in the TT an analogical phraseme in absent, characterised by polysemy of the exact part of the component, the translator has to make a decision to save only one of the original stylistic device.

1.6 Irony

This subsection will be devoted to the characteristics, the issue of interference between the speaker and the hearer and the ability to recognize irony in the works by van Limpt and Mateo.

One of the purposes of using irony may be humour, but not entirely. As Attardo (2001) states, irony and humour interface each other, but they are not the same. The linking point is that both humour and irony result in unexpected outcome. According to Attardo, the trigger of humour in irony is the element of surprise, but it is crucial to be aware of the fact that irony does not necessarily has to be humorous, it may be, for instance dramatic irony.

An ironical statement is considered to be hard to determine and to react when it occurs, whereas a direct expression is rather obvious. The most pivotal aspect of irony is that the hearer could realize that it was indeed intended. Attardo explains the hearer's position by saying that “the reconstruction of ironist's intended meaning is supposed to be based on set of shared presuppositions” between the hearer and the speaker. Both, the speaker and the hearer have to share a common culture, for example being from the same country or particular knowledge, for instance both of them enjoyed football in high school.

There are no humorous words by themselves, as every humorous situation needs a context in which it may function as humour, similarly irony. An idiom, an expression or a connotation of a word is required to achieve irony. Mateo states that wordplay is different than irony, which has a double interpretation, because of its linguistic structure and the more about meaning than interpretation.

There is an issue of wrong interference between the speaker and the hearer. It is crucial to somehow signal the intention to joke, due to a danger to compromise laughter or the necessity of a quick response to the joke. The ironist has a choice to decide whether signal irony or not. Some topics, because of their characteristic are commonly regarded as ironic, hence the intention of being ironic is hidden in the context.

Mateo indicates two types of irony: intentional and unintentional, sometimes called linguistic and dramatic or instrumental and observable. The main difference is that intentional irony is being communicated, unintentional irony is already present in the setting.

1.7 Problems with humour translation

The last subsection in this chapter is rife with dilemmas in translating humour. This subsection includes various possibilities of translating puns by Delabastita, Kalaga's levels of untranslatability, Mateo and Olbrects-Tyteca's thoughts on the problematic side of translating humour.

Delabastita mentions three cases in which the prospect of a proper translation of a pun is possible:

1. between historically related languages, especially wordplay based on sound similarity, for example, between Dutch and English.

2. Since it is rooted in extralingual reality, wordplay based on polysemy can be reduplicated with little loss even between historically unrelated languages.

3. Interlingual borrowings common to both the target language and the source language.

The translator has to solve a conundrum, because in translation of puns there will be an inevitable loss of features of the pun in source text, nonetheless it is the translator's task to diminish the differentiation between the source text and the target text. There is probably no natural way of dealing with the translation loss of puns.

Delabastita provides a list of eight possibilities of translating puns

1) PUN > PUN

This strategy involves translation of the ST pun into a pun in the TT. In most of the cases, the properties of the ST pun and the TT pun will not be the same. The TT pun may differ in form, contextual meaning, textual effect or demantic content.

2) PUN > NON-PUN

The ST pun turns into a phrase in the TT that comprises both or only one sense of the original pun, particularly the one with the more considerable context.

3) PUN > Related Rhetorical Device

A pun is replaced with another rhetorical device for instance alliteration, repetition or rhyme in order to create a similar effect in the TT.

4) PUN > ZERO

This pun is not translated, moreover it is simply discarded.

5) PUN ST = PUN TT

In this particular case, the translator is able to fully reproduce the pun from the ST into a pun in the TT.

6) NON-PUN > PUN

A strategy used to compensate any losses in the TT. From no signs of wordplay in the ST, a pun is created in the TT.

7) ZERO > PUN

This strategy is similar to the previous one, but here it adds some additional information concerning the context of the wordplay.

8) Editorial Techniques

A ST pun cannot be translated fully and a translator needs a footnote to explain the meaning of the TT pun to the reader.

Kalaga mentions three levels of untranslatability; in each level the reason of untranslatability is different:

1) Humour is in the language and comes from the linguistic material.

a. Untranslatability proceeds from lexical, grammatical or morphological idiosyncrasy of the source language that do not possess any equivalents in other languages.

b. A peculiar case of untranslatability is based on a certain blockade in which the target language is mocked in the source language.

2) Humour has a extralingustic character and comes from a model of the world; language is purely a media.

The source of the humour is an item, a relation, a situation or an entity that emerges from the description and is presented by the descriptive ability of the language, but in the case of humour, independent from the language. Translatability of humour is fully possible here providing that firstly, a language is not making any “extrahumorous” difficulties and secondly that there are not any interference or culture blockade.

3) Humour comes from a model of the world, but the model is not directly communicated by the language (media), as it is included in the language and results from it.

a. Humour stems from connotations characteristic especially for a certain cultural circle.

b. Humour is a result of mocking a set model of the world by a wordplay. It happens on the brink of sociology, cultural studies and theory of translation. Blockade or interference in translation occurs not because of the language properties or its connotations, but because of the additional layer of the translation, which could be called an interlingual translation.

The easiest type of jokes to translate are the universal ones, but do they really exist? Jokes based on culture require the reader to be familiar with the cultural context in a particular joke. Next type is irony and the humour on reversal of situation. The most difficult kind of joke, according to is humour based on linguistic aspects, for instance, puns.

Diot (1989) describes the difficulty in translating humour as follows: “When it comes to translating humour, the operation proves to be as desperate as that of translating poetry”.

A reader has to have a certain background knowledge and cultural context to fully appreciate irony. According to Mateo, the translation of humour relies on the closeness of cultures - the difficulty rises with the distance from the culture. Even an understandable joke may require a different mechanisms for the translator to pass the humorous meaning to the target language.

The majority of critics are in agreement that the translator's task is to keep the source text ambiguity, style or tone whenever it is possible and valid in the text. Using an “equivalent effect” is the second option. A translator has to somehow adapt the source text humorous effect in the target language. The main drawback of this method is that mostly it is a personal choice and it is based on the translator's intuition.

Writing in 1974, Olbrechts-Tyteca analysed laughter as a humour criterion. She pointed out 5 reasons why its application is demanding or even not possible.

1) “Laughter largely exceeds humour”. Olbrechts-Tyteca refers to a work by Aubouin in 1948 in which there is a distinction between laughter that came from humour and the psychological laughter, which could be caused by e.g. hallucinogens.

2) “Laughter does not always have the same meaning”. In this point, Olbrechts_Tyteca mentioned the phenomenon of ritual laughter and gave an example from Africa, where laughter is sometimes a sign of bewilderment or amusement. Considering this point, Aubouin refers to the Oriental courtesy smile.

3) “Laughter is not directly proportionate to the intensity of humor”. As Olbrechts_Tyteca (1974) observed that there is a differentiation among people that concern the attitude towards humour.

4) Olbrechts-Tyteca in her next point states that “humor elicits sometimes laughter, sometimes a smile”. She observed the disagreement among scholars, who are “viewing smiling as an attenuated form of laughter”.

5) Last, but not least, Olbrechts-Tyteca claimed that laughter or smiling could not be always observed directly. Laughter has to be somehow interpreted as well as the assessment of the social meaning and the fact that laughter can be simulated.

It is crucial for scholars as well as for translators to measure the importance of humour in a given text. Presuming the equal importance of humour in source and target text can be risky, similarly the nature of the text may differ in the translation and in the source text.

Zabalbeascoa mentions an exquisite translation motto on how to translate humour: “translate the words and/or the contents and then keep your fingers crossed and hope that the humour will somehow come across with the rest”. This, in some cases refers to the point of view of several translators that are in opposition to humour translation, because of its untranslatability.

A translator has to be aware of how humour may be vital in a specific context. There is no place for omission or loss of humour in a translation, when for example the aim of the text is comedy or in the process of “breaking the ice”. In these cases, humour omission will drastically change the target text.

Humour has ample ways of functioning and that is way it so commonly used by authors, because it can thwart or divert attention of a certain situation. Zabalbeascoa concludes that the translator has to decide, whether criticism is a pivotal part of humour or is it a vast dose of humour that is brought by a joke.



Chapter 2. Analysis of humour in The Witcher books by A. Sapkowski

The second chapter will be devoted primarily to the analysis of the humour translation of The Witcher. Other parts of this chapter will discuss several aspects such as general information about the author of the books, the language of The Witcher and the characteristics of amateur translation.

2.1 Corpus features

Andrzej Sapkowski is a famous Polish fantasy writer, who gained popularity mainly because his series The Witcher. It is a series of books that describe adventures of Geralt, a witcher and many of his fellow companions. Sapkowski created a fictional universe in which the plot of The Witcher saga takes place.

The Witcher saga has not been translated into English. Only the first of five books (Blood of Elves) is officially published in Britain and in the United States. The remaining part of the saga meant to be published, but because of several delays, the series stopped on the first book. After the success of The Witcher video game, publishers started to reconsider the translation of the series, but without any progress so far.

This thesis is based on the amateur translation made by The Witcher fans across the globe from The Witcher computer game forum. They created a topic “Our Community Fan Translations” in which they posted their translation of certain chapters or fragments of the books. There is a variety of language used to translate the book into English such as Polish, Czech and Spanish. Because of this variety, it is impossible to track the correct translation to the proper language version of the book. The multitude of translators is a curse and a blessing, especially when they are not professionals. They may be able to work faster in a group, to spell and grammar check the text much more faster, but the overall impression may be lower, because of their lack of translation skills. But on the other hand - how can it be known who is the “amateur”?

One of the most significant aspects of Sapkowski's books is his language. The language of The Witcher is archaic, but on the other hand, full of neologisms, which is a salient feature of his works, especially The Witcher series. Apart from the archaisms and neologisms, the language is burdened with cultural and sociological references that makes The Witcher incomprehensible at times. The translator, in this case translators, has to be aware of the cultural differences that need to be preserved in the target text. Humour itself is troublesome for translators, but humour loaded with archaisms and neologisms is a challenge.

2.2 Quantitative analysis

In this section, the types of jokes will be presented in the form of a chart to show what was the main area of work for the translators. The types of jokes that are mentioned here, come from the work of Delabastita (1996).

The pie chart presented above signifies that most of the jokes are properly translated. 38%, which is 35 out of 92 puns, from the whole jokes mentioned in the appendix is considered to be properly reproduced in the target text. Then, we have 32% that is 29 out of 92 jokes was a translation of pun into another pun. After that, both untranslatable humour and wanting translation of humour had 15% (14 out of 92).

This chart suggests that most of the jokes were translated properly in the target language. Summing up the number of proper translation and the translation that was slightly changed, we obtain 70%, which is 62 examples out of 92. As we can see, the pie chart shows us that the amateur translators did a decent job and the majority of the jokes were adequately translated. Can we say that 70% of translation is enough to say that its level is high?

This question will be answered in the next section, which will contain the elaborated analysis of the examples from The Witcher.

2.3 Qualitative analysis

This section will present multiple humour types and theirs translation from the source text into the target text. The analysis will be made on a longer segments of text in order to better grasp the context of the given situation, because in translation of humour it is of great importance. The types of humour will be based on the ones presented by Delabastita, 1996.

2.3.1 Translation of pun into another pun

This category will contain examples of humour that were translated properly into the TT, but there may be some changes in form, style etc.

(1) ST:`- A nie mówi³am? - wrzasnê³a Milva, gdy tylko Jaskier skoñczy³ jej objaœniaæ, o co sz³o Regisowi. - Nic, jeno o tym! M¹drze zaczynaj¹, a zaw¿dy na dupie koñcz¹!'

The English equivalent is longer, which is a bit unusual, because of the complexity of the Polish language; Polish is considered to be more convoluted.

TT: `Did I not tell you?' Milva cried at the same moment that Regis had finished explaining to Dandelion. `It's always the same! They begin with wisdom and always end up between a girl's legs!'

The pun in the ST is slightly different in the TT, but still it preserves the humour and wit of the dialogue. The change is not great, the joke keeps its sexual connotation, but what is most important, the joke works and the humour is maintained. A delicate change in the words related to the body - in Polish there is dupa and in English `legs'. Nowadays, the word dupa in Polish may be ambiguous, because of the slang; it can mean as well a part of a human body, but also a girl (in most cases very attractive). Moreover, in this context, the word dupa may mean as well nothing; the fragment could be considered as they (men) start to plan something witty, but in the end they do not do a thing (sjp.pwn.pl).

Another example is not problematic, but the translation seems to be a bit simplified.

ST: Ty w³óczêgo! Ty zachrypniêty ba¿ancie!

- Za co ona ciebie tak? Coœ przeskroba³, Jaskier?

- Normalnie - wzruszy³ ramionami trubadur. - Wymaga monogamii, jedna z drug¹, a

sama rzuca w cz³owieka cudzymi spodniami. S³ysza³eœ, co o mnie wykrzykiwa³a?

Na bogów, ja te¿ znam takie, które ³adniej odmawiaj¹, ni¿ ona daje, ale nie krzyczê o tym po ulicach. Idziemy st¹d.

The role of the hero in this segment is reversed; in Polish it's the girl, who Dandelion is talking about. In English, Dandelion talks about himself.

TT: “Vagabond! Damned crook!”

“Why is she so upset? Have you done something stupid, Dandelion?”

“The usual,” the troubadour replied with a shrug. “She requires that I be monogamous, but she herself doesn't hesitate to display another man's pants to the whole world. You heard her name-calling? By the gods, I personally have bedded better women, but I refrain from shouting as much in the middle of the street. Let's go.”

The troublesome part in this example is the interpretation of the Polish phrase `(…) ja te¿ znam takie, które ³adniej odmawiaj¹, ni¿ ona daje' and the English counterpart `I personally bedded better woman'. The joke could be maintained better in the TT by the fuller understanding of the Polish equivalent that suggest a very exquisite sexual reference. It may be translated as `I also know girls that more pleasantly say no, than she gives'.

The translators often have a problem concerning some of the Polish proper names. There is an example of a card game in which the proper names of the cards are almost rooted in the culture and the tradition of playing cards is vast among Poles.

(ST: - Pó³ placka w kule!

- Ma³a kupa w dzwonki!

- Gwint!

- Akces. Wist! Wy³ó¿cie wychodek. O ¿e¿ - Ha-ha-ha! Jeno ni¿nik z ma³ymi. W miêtkie trafione! Pierwej prawdziwie usrasz siê, nim ma³¹ kupê usk³adasz!

- Uwidzim jeszcze. Ni¿nika k³adê. Co, wzi¹³? Ech, Yazon, pogra³eœ jak rzyæ kacza!

- Czemuœ panny nie po³o¿y³, zasrañcze? Ech, wzi¹³bym pa³ê...

English translation lacks proper names of the cards, so instead the translators simply used colours that are used in the card deck for instance `diamonds' or `hearts'.

TT: `Double clubs!'

`Stack of diamonds!'

`Screwed!'

`Raise. Hearts! Oh m...'

`Ha, ha, ha! A jack and a runt! Before you take a good shit you have to mount a heap!'

`I'll put down the jack! Hey, Yazon, you have sunk like a duck's ass!'

`Why not put down the lady, you bastard? I picked up a spade...'

This is one of the fragments in which the usage of the Polish archaic language is of great value to the understanding and strengthening humour. Words such as pierwej, uwidzim, rzyæ, czemuœ are signifiers of the archaic language and add a specific feature to the context of the dialogue, making it funnier for the reader.

There are three main puns in this short dialogue; two of them are translated poorly. The first one, `Pierwej prawdziwie usrasz siê, nim ma³¹ kupê usk³adasz!' and its English equivalent `Before you take a good shit you have to mount a heap!'. This is one of the examples in which the English punchline sounds better than in the original Polish version, because of maintaining the Polish meaning, but especially because of its rhyme. The next one, `Ech, Yazon, pogra³eœ jak rzyæ kacza!' in Polish, and `Hey, Yazon, you have sunk like a duck's ass!' is a representation of a false translation technique. The translators decided to copycat the Polish expression into English, probably not knowing about its idiomatic meaning. That is why, in the TT, the equivalent is not used properly. Instead of translating the Polish one, the translators could have used an English phrase for example `You suck like a fox!' or simply explain the phrase by saying that `You played like a fool, idiot, dick etc.'. Last, but not least: the Polish phrase `Ech, wzi¹³bym pa³ê...' and the translated part `I picked up a spade...'. The last humorous situation falls flat in the TT because of wrong tense and the word `spade'. The past tense ruins the joke, because of the incongruence of the action and the tense. The word `spade' used in this fragment may signify a shovel, which is not a proper equivalent of the word pa³a, which is a slang word for a stick or a rod. In addition, in the context of cards, `spade' is one of the card colour, which only increases the ambiguity among the readers, because they are not sure what is the proper context of the statement. The phrase could be translated into the TT as `Aargh, I would take a rod…'.

2.3.2 Wanting translation of humour

This particular section will contain examples of humour that was not entirely translated or somehow the translation did not encapsulate an entire pun.

The first representation is an example of a translated pun in which lack of only one word, changes the whole situation completely. The Polish ST is as follows:

ST: - On tylko tak g³upio wygl¹da - potwierdzi³ Jaskier. - Ale ca³y czas liczê na to, ¿e wreszcie zechce mu siê wytê¿yæ mózgownicê. Mo¿e wyci¹gnie s³uszne wnioski? Mo¿e zrozumie, ¿e jedyn¹ czynnoœci¹, która dobrze wychodzi samotnym, jest samogwa³t?

The English equivalent, apart from a slightly different language, is translated properly.

TT: `He just looks so silly,' Dandelion confirmed. `But in time he will finally use his brain. He may even draw a valid conclusion. That the only activity that a man does alone is masturbation.'

The troubling part is the last sentence, where in Polish there is: `Mo¿e zrozumie, ¿e jedyn¹ czynnoœci¹, która dobrze wychodzi samotnym, jest samogwa³t?' and the English counterpart is as follows: `That the only activity that a man does alone is masturbation'. Except for the lack of one word. In Polish its dobrze, in English it should be `good', or in this case, `well'. Without that word, the whole punchline and the joke falls flat. Doing something well while being alone is different than doing something alone. The whole context is changed and the joke is discarded. The sentence itself is foolish without the word `well', even awkward. This fragment is crucial in understanding how a single word can entirely change the whole sentence, even when the sentence is properly build and can be easily understood.

Another example of a translation that could be done differently is a translation of a short song by one of the main characters from The Witcher, a bard, named Dandelion.

ST: Nie dziwota, ¿e s¹ harde urodziwe panie Wszak im drzewo wynioœlejsze, tym trudniej wleŸæ na nie.

- Idiota - skomentowa³a Milva. Jaskier nie przej¹³ siê. W¿dy i z pann¹, i ze drzewem kto nie kiep poradzi Trzeba owszem wzi¹æ i zer¿n¹æ, no i po zawadzie.

The target text is built in the same manner as the original Polish text.

TT: It is not unusual beautiful women are hard to see,

The more proud the tree, the high you have to climb it.

`Idiot.' Milva commented. Dandelion continued unfazed.

A girl can be a tree but a fool who is not, should get an ax and end the problem.

In this fragment, again only one word is problematic. Zer¿n¹æ in Polish and `ax' in English are the words of the biggest matter in the understanding of the pun. When discussing the Polish word, it is important to distinguish the two meanings of this word, which contribute to the creation of a humorous punchline, especially in a song. The word zer¿n¹æ means to cut down or to fuck (in the context of the song). However, the word `ax' signifies only the first meaning, therefore the second interpretation is not maintained. It is significant to know the two `heroes' of the song: a tree and a girl. In the source text it worked perfectly, because of the combination of the two meanings of the word zer¿n¹æ. In the target text, word `ax' is not sufficient to preserve the sexual connotation.

An example of how to handle, or in this particular situation how not to handle, with an extraordinary humorous situation can be presented in this fragment:

ST: - Jakoœ tak wysz³o.

- Wyf³o! - królowa usi³owa³a siê zaœmiaæ, ale nie bardzo jej siê uda³o. Wykrzywi³a siê, zaklê³a brzydko, acz niewyraŸnie, splunê³a znowu. Zanim zd¹¿y³a zas³oniæ usta, zobaczy³ paskudn¹ ranê, zauwa¿y³ brak kilku zêbów. Z³owi³a jego spojrzenie. - Atak - powiedzia³a zza chusteczki, patrz¹c mu w oczy. - Jakif fkurwyfyn waln¹³ mnie profto w gêbê.

The English equivalent is translated almost word by word and mostly that is why, there is a small issue with the translation.

TT: `It just happened.'

`Wyflo!' the queen attempted to laugh, but did not succeed. She frowned, then cursed, although unclear and spat again. Before she was able to cover her mouth, he saw a terrible wound and noticed the lack of several teeth. She caught his eye.

`The attack,' she said from behind the handkerchief, looking into his eyes. `Jakif fkurwyfyn slammed me in the mouth.'

The whole humour in this short fragment is based on the impaired speech of the queen, who was hit in the mouth. In fact, it is hard to unanimously decide if the translation is proper or not. The entire punchline is focused on the Queen's speech impairment. In Polish, the mispronounced words are still understood and the context of the situation is clear, whereas in the target text, the mispronounced words are left in Polish, so the English reader cannot understand them. Why these words were not translated? Probably because they should be misunderstood, because of the speech impairment. But still, this could be achieved by simply replacing the Polish misspelled words with their English equivalents for instance `Hapnd!' instead of Wyflo! or `Sam madyfaka' instead of Jakif fkurwyfyn.

2.3.3 Untranslatable humour

The translation of humour is a demanding task. As mentioned before in this thesis, the translation of humour which consist of a language full of archaisms and neologisms is a challenge and because of that, it is possible that certain humorous puns will not be translated or mirrored in the target text correctly.

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