Problems of Translating Humor from English into Arabic
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.25130/Lang.9.3.P2.24Keywords:
Humor, Translation, Intralingual, Inter semioticAbstract
Most authors and writers of translation had defined the term “translation” and explained it according to his own words and thought. One of those authors is Savory (1958) who said that translation has two types, the first type is “literal translation”, and the second one called “non-literal translation”. Jackobson (1958) divided translation into three types:(a) intralingual translation, (b) interlingual translation, and (c) inter semiotic translations whereas Nida (1964) views translation in terms of formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence. Humor means the mental group of discovering or expressing something in a way or another. It also means to be funny or amused by something that are funny. In other words, one can say that humor means to do something that will not lead to upset others. The study aims at (1) showing and resolving the problems, which face translators when they translating humor into Arabic and (2) Showing in some cases that there is a need to adopt an interdisciplinary approach in order to arrive at a better translation. It hypothesized that (1) there is no one to one formal correspondence between the source language and target language in translating humor and (2) transferring the structures of the source language to target language is the appropriate procedure for translating humor.
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