My sister and I have been clearing out my mother’s bookcases and I came across an item I thought had been lost. It’s a book of Garfield cartoons in German. I have the same book in English and comparing the language is fun, but sometimes literal translation is hard to do. Jokes are hard to understand sometime.
Mom also had a German language copy of Gone With the Wind Translating slave dialect must be a hassle, would a less educated sounding German dialect be used?
Have you ever had to try doing something like making humor or jokes comprehensible to another language, from an original?
I’ve translated jokes from English to Russian, and vice versa. Sometimes it’s easy, sometimes not. It helps if you know a lot of slang, of course. But sometimes what they and we consider funny differs greatly.
I once showed some Far Side cartoons to a Russian friend of mine. All he could say was “I honestly don’t see the humor in these.”
I wasn’t the one doing the translation (I am solidly monolingual so it’s possibly churlish to complain) but I recently read an Asterix and Oblisik comic for the first time as an adult (I loved them as a kid)
I was super disappointed by the fact they are not that funny at all and most of the jokes (other than romans bring repeatedly hit on the head) are translated puns that really don’t work.
I guess as a kid seeing romans being repeatedly hit on the head was all the humor I needed?
I don’t know which edition of the books you read, but Bell and Hockridge very rarely translated the French puns literally or in any other way, because it simply wouldn’t have worked. What they did was write puns of their own (in English) that were every bit as funny as the original ones (in French).
The only French pun they translated literally that I can think of offhand is in Asterix in Switzerland:
ROMAN BORDER GUARD: Anything to declare? OBELIX: I’m hungry.
I found the same thing, when I studied Russian during my undergrad years. I liked to read Krokodil, the USSR’s humour magazine, which was available at the university library. Many times, the cartoons were funny, and the pictures certainly helped as I was learning the language; but some of the jokes and anecdotes that readers sent in, left me asking “Where’s the humour?”
I guess that they were considered funny to Krokodil’s intended audience, but some of them just left me puzzled as to why this joke or that anecdote was considered by the editors to be funny.
When I was in grad school, I translated the old joke about the mouse and the singing butterfly and told it to one of my professors, an elderly Russian woman. She thought it was hilarious. So sometimes the humor barrier can be broken.
A classmate told me a set of jokes in Russian that had me laughing heartily. I won’t write them here, but I can tell you they involved a royal piano.
What’s all the more intriguing about Asterix&Obelix is that they were translated into 30-some languages, ALL of which had to deal somehow with all the wordplay. That’s got to be a big order.
There were at least a few cases where Bell & Hockridge couldn’t or didn’t come up with any clever dialog for the English translation. So in some cases, they simply replaced the original dialog with some other entirely unrelated pun-less dialog that could somehow fit in with the story line.
ETA: I happen to have Asterix And Cleopatra in both English and Hebrew. I can’t read much of the Hebrew, but I noticed this: Since Hebrew is read from right-to-left, they literally made a mirror-image of ALL the drawings, to get the flow of the pictures to follow the flow of the text.
One of my classes was a conversation class. We met once a week, just for conversation–no grammar lessons, no vocabulary lessons, no quizzes or tests, just talking about how our week went, movies we’d seen, sports we’d watched, how our car was working, Bob’s weird girlfriend, and so on. The same stuff we discussed in English in the cafeteria, only in this class, we discussed it in Russian. It was very informal, and we usually had it over coffee and cookies, in a small seminar room. Participation counted, however; and the only rule was that Russian must be spoken, never English. Of course, our professor was there, to help out, if a student was well and truly stuck on something.
Like I said, participation counted, and one of our classmates was a little shy at first. Knowing that he had to participate somehow, he gathered his courage, and attempted a joke during a lull in the conversation. It was of the “Why did the chicken cross the road?” variety, from English, and he struggled through the question.
Blank looks and shrugs from all of us, though we understood perfectly. Then he answered, with a bright smile, though not the best Russian, “To get to the other side,” again not in the best Russian, but we all laughed. That broke the ice, and he enthusiastically joined in the conversation after that.
I’ve read a few in French and German. Some of the dialog in the latter was so funny I started reading it aloud just because I liked how it sounded!
There’s a sequence in Asterix in Britain where a fruit vendor is arguing with a customer while Asterix and Obelix are riding across a bridge in a cart. In French, the vendor smashes a piece of fruit over the customer’s head. Obelix, watching from the cart, says “Look, Asterix! That man has a melon on his head!” (“Melon” being the French term for a Bobby’s helmet.)
In the English version, it goes:
VENDOR: Oh, so this melon is bad, is it?!? CUSTOMER: Rawther, Old Fruit!
And then:
OBELIX: I say, Asterix! I think this bridge is falling down!
There’s no attempt to link the two gags, but they both stand on their own!
DON’T think you’re gonna get away with that tease. It may be old to you, but some of us have no idea what the “old” joke about the mouse and the singing butterfly is.
A guy walks into a saloon and orders a beer. He then reaches into a coat pocket, pulls out a toy piano and bench, and places them on the bar. Next, he reaches into the other pocket, pulls out a mouse, and puts him on the bench Finally, he reaches into his breast pocket, pulls out a butterfly, and puts it on the piano. He snaps his fingers, and the mouse starts to pound out a show tune while the butterfly sings along in perfect harmony.
The bartender stares and says “Goddamn, that’s the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen!”
The guy takes a sip of beer and shakes his head. “It’s not all that great,” he says. “The butterfly doesn’t really sing. The mouse is a ventriloquist.”
I haven’t used the language in years, and I’d be as lost as anybody else here if you were to post the joke in the original Russian. I could work my way through it, I guess, but it would take me quite a while.
Translating puns is one thing. Do all those translations have footnotes explaining, say, regional stereotypes, Marcel Pagnol movies, Victor Hugo poems, and other cultural references we would not expect a foreigner to be familiar with?
Asterix comics do, in fact, have occasional explanatory footnotes (not necessarily serious; often facetious). ETA: Often, explaining some historical context.
There were some good ones in Asterix and Cleopatra, like:
Asterix and Obelix have just beaten the crap out of a contingent of Romans:
CENTURION: Hmmm, that didn’t work. Okay, let’s regroup and charge again! LEGIONARY 1: Another charge like that and we’ll be driven into the Nile! LEGIONARY 2: We’ll be annihilated! LEGIONARY 3: One more pun like that and I desert!
