# How do professional translators do it on the fly?

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-professional-translators-do-it-on-the-fly/926264>\
**Category:** Factual Questions\
**Created:** [November 23, 2020, 3:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-professional-translators-do-it-on-the-fly/926264 "2020-11-23T15:02:28Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 55

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**Author:** ![Pardel-Lux](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pardel-lux/32/20182_2.png) [@Pardel-Lux](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Pardel-Lux)\
**Post date:** [December 6, 2020, 9:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-do-professional-translators-do-it-on-the-fly/926264/55 "2020-12-06T21:40:14Z")

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I was reading the parallel [thread](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-are-puns-and-wordplay-translated/926560/48) about pun translation and I just wondered how that works for hearing impaired people. If a pun is based on a homophone sound, would your clients have understood it by your gestures? Do the signs reflect the sounds and so show the pun, or would your clients need an additional explanation, which might even be impossible to grasp for someone who does not _hear_ the pun? I would have thought before reading the above mentioned thread that translating a joke from English into American Sign Language would be mostly straight forward: I thought it is the same language (same grammar, same semantics, same syntax…) only expressed through two different “alphabets”; but if puns don’t show in signs then it might be just as difficult as for other languages: if chance is not on your side, you can’t.

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