I quite like that! That’s too clever for the song by half.
Instinctively, I thought, “con-fiture” and then you could riff on how the bad guys were idiots. Then I double-checked that. In Quebec, “con” means “idiot”, but in France it’s more like “a-hole” and wielded as an insult. There’s noteworthy differences in the dialects, but that runs the risk of going wildly off-topic.
That said, minding the dialects is kind of important and I’ll wrap up my tangent with a kind of a favourite example. That one “famous” Rick Moranis movie, “Honey, I shrunk the kids,” was entitled, “Chérie, j’ai rétreci les gosses,” in France, and “Chérie, j’ai réduit les enfants” in Quebec. If the contintental version showed in Canada, people would have come out of the movie greatly disappointed as not a single testicle was shrunk.
Asterix is French, so I assume the source jokes are all in the French version… I wonder how much free reign the translators had.
I remember getting a second copy of Tintin’s “Destination Moon”. These were versions translated in Britain, and in America. In the slapstick-ish scene where Haddock is looking at the reactor and backing up, he’s at a loss for words “It’s… it’s…” until he trips backward. In one translation the professor says “It’s overwhelming?” in the other, “It bowls you over?”
Sometimes too it’s culture. Not humor, but I remember reading commentary about “Death of a Salesman” that the play bombed in London because the British did not have the same obsession about career success that the Americans did. Similarly, something like Fawlty Towers best portrays what British find culturally humorous, that some will go to cringeworthy lengths to avoid admitting they were wrong.
But more specifically related to puns, I think it was Asimov who pointed out that you can’t really make a pun between Polish and polish (Europeans vs. cleaning shoes) since although spelled the same, we generally “hear” puns when we read them, so the different pronunciations spoil it.
Of course, similar issues arise with translating poetry. Except there, instead of two different meanings, you have meaning and structure (meter, rhyme scheme, etc.). And not all structures even work in all languages: English poetry, for instance, is largely based on rhyme, but in an inflected language, words rhyming might just mean that they’re the same case, and so rhymes are either guaranteed or impossible.
As I’ve heard it expressed, a translation of a poem might sometimes be a poem, and it might even be a good poem, but it cannot be the same poem.
I just sent this to my friend who doesn’t like puns. So the rest of us make sure she sees all the puns. I will look at it later this week when I have more time.
I love puns and wordplay and I think English lends itself to this type of humor, as there are a lot of homonyms, which other languages don’t have. German seems to be somewhat lacking.
Donald Tusk, when becoming President of the European Council in 2014, famous for speaking rather bad English, which was seen as a handicap in Brussels, said in one of his first press conferences that he would “polish his English”. I thought it was a good pun. Maybe it was a pun because he did pronounce it weirdly.
And by the way: he did.
Those are homonyms neither in pronunciation nor in writing. It’s only your lossy English transcription that makes them seem that way. (What is omitted from your rendition is the tones, which are contrastive in Chinese.)
All languages have homonyms, though not all puns employ homonyms. (In my experience, most English puns don’t—they instead employ words that sound similar but not identical.) I’m not sure if other languages use punning as much as English does, though it’s a pretty safe guess that all languages do use them at least occasionally. There was a study a while back that sampled languages from all extant language families; native speakers of every language sampled reported familiarity with puns and even supplied a few for the study.
Sure, the different "shi"s aren’t all pronounced exactly the same, but they’re still close enough to pun on. And even when you include tone, Chinese still has a lot of homophones.
Even within a language, there isn’t always agreement on what words are homophonic. In English, see pin/pen, cot/caught, and Mary/marry/merry.
I’ve read that in languages where there is more overlap between words, they aren’t necessarily “puns” – the overlap adds degrees of meaning without suggesting a laugh or a groan. Translation into English doesn’t loose the “humor”, because there wasn’t any to start with, but does loose some of the refractive brilliance.
There’s a cross-language pun I’ve been curious about for years. In the movie City of Lost Children (minor spoilers ahead), there’s a girl named Miette (“crumb”) who’s being guarded by a strongman. At one point he loses her and goes to drown his sorrows in a bar. A bar floozy comes over, he looks at her breasts, and she smirks, “They haven’t failed me yet.”
“MIETTE!” he sobs, disconsolate.
Thing is, that’s the subtitles. Whatever she says in French, she ends that sentence with the sound “me yet.”
Does anyone know what she says, so that the pun works in French and English?
I can find a dubbed version: the moment in question is at 54:30. It’s also on Amazon Prime for free, if any Francophone here has a subscription; the moment in question is at 56:45. It sounds something like “ees on par par en miette.”
This is why I keep reading the Dope! There are experts on all sorts of things you would never guess!
When I lived in Japan, I often watched comedies in the movie theater and would read the Japanese subtitles as well as listening to the English. There were many times where I’d be the only one in the entire theater laughing because they simply wouldn’t have translated the joke or pun.
The first time I really became aware of it was that early 80s movie “Mr. Mom” where Michael Keaton had suddenly become a stay-at-home dad.
He is at home and the TV repairwoman pays a visit. She says she’s there to fix his horizontal hold, and when he says he didn’t know there was a problem with it, the repair woman said his wife said there was. Then he said if anyone knew there was a problem it would be his wife.
The Japanese just had it as a factual exchange without attempting to translate the joke. American action movies were more popular in Japan than comedies for that reason.
Of course younger readers would have to know what “horizontal hold” is, but the demographics here means most should get that.