I don’t mean so-called ‘bilingual puns’ where a foreign word is dropped into an English sentence (‘Look at that S-car go!’), but rather, puns or other similar wordplay where the meaning survives translation, even though the translated words are totally different.
So for example, the joke:
Q: How do you greet a snowman?
A: Ice to meet you
If this were translated to another language in the way I am looking for, we’d be looking for words synonymous with ‘ice’ in that language, that also sound similar to a key word in conventional greeting-type sentence in that language.
Obviously this might be easier in languages where the words in question are cognates, so I suppose I’m especially interested in cases where that isn’t so.
Way back in my misspent youth, when I was studying the classics instead of messing around with sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, we were translating one of the Greek tragedies, or maybe the Odyssey. In this passage, a goddess said to the hero that she was going to spoil him; the double-entendre of “spoil” meaning both “to treat lavishly” and “to ruin” was the same in both languages.
I’m not sure if you’d consider a double-entendre to be a pun, but it’s all I’ve got for now.
Ages ago, when I was living in Budapest, there was a bicycle shop in the Castle district. In Hungarian, “bicycle” is kerékpár and “castle” is vár. So they called themselves Kerékvár.
They didn’t translate their name into English. But the pun also works in English! Bicastle.
In the French-language movie City of Lost Children, the three main characters (One, Miette, and Kranc) have names with meaning in three different languages: One in English, “Miette” is “crumb” in French, and “Kranc” is “Sick” in German (I think). At one point, One has lost his tiny friend Miette and thinks she’s gone forever, so he’s drowning his sorrows in a bar, and a prostitute is trying to distract him. It’s working, until she says something (in English) like, “Well, you haven’t tried me yet!” and One moans, “Miette!” and starts to sob.
It’s a brilliant bit of translation, because in French the character also says a sentence ending in the sounds “me yet,” so the pun in French also works in English.
At some point, someone on the board tracked down a French script for the movie and found the exact line in French–but I’m having trouble finding where they did that.
The pun in Oscar Wilde’s play “The Importance Of Being Earnest” kinda works in the German title “Ernst sein ist alles” too, as “Ernst” is both a male first name and means earnestness or earnest.
I’m pretty sure that in French the title is L’Importance d’Être Constant. Different first name, same idea.
As noted above, this doesn’t work, but the Spanish model does, more or less : le purCHAToire
Just for fun, I came up with this when I read the OP:
- Que dit-on à un bonhomme de neige que l’on rencontre pour la première fois ? - Enneigé ! (“snow-covered”)
It kind of works because the first and last sounds are the same as the expected word and both have 3 syllables (Enchanté) but it’s… lame and not funny.
In Catalan they translated it as something like “L’importància d’èsser Frank”, with “Frank” being homonymous with the Catalan word “franc” that means “sincere”.
