The sentence “Give me a hand” has the same double meaning in English and
Spanish (ie: “Come help me” or “Give me applause”). If you need help and you
say to your smart aleck friend Juan “Dame un mano” he might start clapping
instead of comming to your aid.
True, but unlike your example which is immediately transparent, mine feels like a stretch. I think it’d need some setup to make sense.
I suspect there are a few languages that preserve the wordplay in the old “walk this way” gag:
Miles Gloriosus (The Braggart Warrior), a comedy by Roman playwright Titus Plautus was one of the source plays for “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” by Stephen Sondheim. In the notes accompanying a translation by Erich Segal (of “Love Story” fame), Segal writes with some pride about his translation of a particular line. A drunken character, stammering about his condition, says ma-ma-mammare (“drunk,” plausibly preceded by the word “breast). In the English translation, he says “tit-tit-tipsy.”
So at least we know that some puns retain their punniness when translated into English.
I’m pretty sure that this is close to the Holy Grail of literary translators all over the world. Well, not this particular pun, of course but finding a wonderfully adequate way to render both meaning and form.
David Bellos writes about his joy of finally finding a way translate a particularly complex pun found in one of Georges Perec’s books. The way he describes it, it almost feels like a religious epiphany. Or a major technological breakthrough.
I read here once about a scene in one of the goofy parody movies where an equine has a problem with its voice, and a character says “He’s just a little hoarse”. The German translation was something like “He’s a little rusty”, where “rusty” also means “horse”.
Anyone remember the details? I think it was @CalMeacham who told the story.
I don’t know the context, but I can’t think of a way that pun would work in German. Words for “horse” in German are Pferd, Ross, Pony, Mähre, Stute (mare) or Hengst (stallion), and none of these words correspond to any word that could make it a pun.
ETA: wait, the word “rusty” made me think of a possible, but really constrained pun. The German word for “rusty” is “rostig”, and the adjective for a mare in heat is “rossig”, and both words are, with a lot of stretching, kind of homonymous. Maybe this pun worked on these words?
That’d be “Top Secret”.
I’m afraid I had nothing to do with that one. You’ll have to look somewhere else.
Die Hard 2: Die Harder
In French, the reading of “Die Hard Deux” sounds nearly exactly the same as the English “Die Harder” and I thought it was super clever advertising.
It took me years to realize this was probably not an intentional thing, as the pun appreciation of the bilingual Canadian market isn’t a big driver of Hollywood marketing decisions.
It still makes me smile, though!
“Did everything come out all right?” (to someone who just pooped) works in Spanish, too — same double meaning: “¿Todo salió bien?”
(If Nava still Doped, surely she’d point out that the better Spanish for the “did everything work out?” meaning is “¿Todo se salió bien?”…but she’s not here, so we’ll just skip that…)