A Study on Translation of Humorous Elements: An Example of A Christmas Night

Abstract

Translation has been one of the main methods of intercultural communication and an important form of cultural encounters since the earliest times. It transfers the culture of the other between languages and cultures as the mediator. In literary translation, the translation of cultural elements is one of the most important problems encountered in the process of rewriting in the target language.This problem becomes even more complicated in the translation of humor as every society has a different sense of humor. In this regard, humor holds a very sensitive place in literature with its many varieties. The same elements that affect writing and intelligibility of humor appear in translation. For this reason, humorous texts are considered as either untranslatable or very difficult to translate. Thus, humor translation is generally considered as lost. Being able to prevent losses in humor translation will depend on the imagination, creativity and rewriting ability of the translator. Based on this point, in this study, the humorous story by Guy de Maupassant named Nuit de Noel (A Christmas Night) was selected, and the methods and strategies were applied in the translation were analyzed in the context of functional dynamic equivalence approach in line with the decisions of translator. Accordingly, it is observed that the adaptation method was used in order to provide the same effect as the source text, and some strategies such as addition, omission, substitution, word for word translation and borrowing were used in the target text. As a result, it was observed that dynamic equivalence was achieved, the target text had almost the same humorous effect as the source text and the translator minimized the loss of humor.