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underdog
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 47
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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 Thu Feb 07, 2008 23:42 pm A joke: echo of the cold war |
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| Aro wrote: | | Haha, we have a similar joke to the first one. A Pole, a German and a Russian find a bottle, a genie comes out and so on. The German says "I want to be rich above any measure", the Russian says the same and the Poles' wish is: I want them to be poor again. |
haha,,, i heard a similar joke like this one. actually there 2 parts . let me find them and share them with you guys~ |
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underdog
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 47
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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| Fri Feb 08, 2008 0:03 am A joke: echo of the cold war |
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ok, i can't find it now, but i will try my best to remember it. there it goes:
| Quote: | One day, there were an American man, an English man and a Korean man who got lost in the desert. they were dying from thirst, hunger and exhaustion.
Then, luckily, they saw a genie in a bottle and they released him.
The genie offer them 3 wishes each person.
the American man wished for a woman on his first wish, and millions of money on the second, and he asked the genie to send him back to America on the third one. POOF!! (learned this from Jamie(K)) his wishes came true and he's gone.
the English man saw and wished the same things. and he got them and he's also gone.
now it is the Korean's turn. He first wished for a bottle of "soo-jew" (a kind of very strong alcohol), and he enjoyed it and finished it very quickly. and then he wanted another bottle. then he pondered, " hum, the "soo-jew" is nice, but i am all alone here. i want company." then he asked the genie to bring back the American man and the English man back to the desert."
POOF!! there they are, back in the desert again. |
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underdog
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 47
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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| Fri Feb 08, 2008 0:18 am A joke: echo of the cold war |
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Part II:
| Quote: | after the third wishes of that Korean's, both the American and the Englishman was back. they were angry but they had no choice but kept walking.
luckily, they saw another bottle with another genie in it. they, again, released him.
this genie was also very kind and offered them 3 wishes each person.
the American and the English man was discussing, "we should let the Korean go first, or we will end up back here with nothing with us."
so, the Korean went first, "I want a bottle of "soo-jew"". he enjoyed it and finished it. then he wanted a second bottle. the genie gave him a second one and asked the Korean what was the third one. the Korean pondered again, and he said, "oh, all I want is alcohol, and I have got them. I am ok now. So, you can go now." POOF! the genie made his wish come true and gone. |
I first saw these 2 jokes on a chinese website. I was laughing so hard that my tears dropped.
It was saying a Chinese guy instead of a Korean. and that Chinese is from a province whose ppl. are famous for being alcoholic.
I used Korean here because I think Koreans are better known as alcoholic than Chinese internationally. (I think, ok, I think)
no offense at all.
and I want to give a lot of credits to the one who originated or invented these jokes~~
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underdog
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Sep 2007
Posts: 47
Location: Toronto, Ontario
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| Fri Feb 08, 2008 5:08 am A joke: echo of the cold war |
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Here's a joke from Czechoslovakia during the time it was communist:
| Quote: | Mr. Cohen applied again and again to the communist government for permission to emigrate to Israel, and his application was rejected over and over again. After every rejection he would file another request, until after two decades a miracle happened! The communist authorities granted him permission to move to Israel!
After he was in Israel for about a year, he decided he didn't like it there, and he applied to the government of Czechoslovakia to let him back in, and they did. After another year, he applied to move to Israel again, and his government let him go, but a year later he asked again to move back from Israel to Czechoslovakia. He ping-ponged back and forth like this several times.
Finally, he was back in Czechoslovakia, and he applied to the communist authorities for another exit visa to emigrate to Israel. By this time the authorities were quite annoyed, and they started to yell at him. "You applied for 20 years to go to Israel, and in a year you wanted to move back home. A year after that, you want to go to Israel again, and you keep trying to go back and forth! Can't you decide which country is better?!"
Mr. Cohen humbly replied, "Well, to tell you the truth, both places are terrible, but during the whole plane trip I'm always so full of hope!" |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Fri Feb 08, 2008 23:39 pm A joke: echo of the cold war |
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| Jamie (K) wrote: | | I don't know how far you'll get with an MA thesis on the untranslatability of humor. A lot of humor and other things from their native countries that people tend to think cannot be understood by those elsewhere really are understood or are translatable, if done it's well. In fact, I read somewhere a scholarly paper by a Polish linguist who made it her point to prove that supposedly untranslatable humor can be translated. She did a good job of translating quite a lot of "untranslatable" jokes! |
I can guarantee to you that there are LOADS of humorous phrases/sketches/jokes that cannot be translated. I mean, if we're talking about a film, the traslator has to deal with it somehow, but "just jokes" don't have to be. I can give you many examples of humour untranslatability, but I'm not sure how to explain the issue to you, as I'm dealing with English-Polish translations only. But let me try to give you a slight of a clue. This one is, I think, from Dexter's Lab:
DeeDee: Why is 6 afraid of 7?
Dexter: Why?
DeeDee: Because 7 ate 9!
You see the play on word here - "ate" and "8" are pronounced the same, but no numbers are pronounced the same as other words in Polish. Because we had our Cartoon Network "Polished", there is a translation for this, but it's rubbish, and the joke is not really funny. You could change the joke into something completly different. I mean, change the meaning and the whole "plot", so to speak, but that's not a translation, that's a cultural adaptation, or, simply a new joke created.
Another example I find really brilliant (not only as regard to translation/untranslatability, but as a funny phrase in general) is a line in "Unce upon a Time in Mexico", when Johnny Depp asks some latino thug: "Are you a Mexican or a Mexican’t?". Again, impossible to translate maintaining the same meaning, sense, and similar play on words.
I know there are many brilliant linguists/translators who do a really good job when it comes to translating humour, but there are many humour aspects that simply cannot be translated into Polish, because of many aspects, such as: grammatical structures of the 2 languages, a little thing called eruditional (or erudical) allusions and many many others. I could go on and on  Of course, I'm not claiming all jokes are untranslatable. There are just those who can't be.
And one more thing:
| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Here's a joke from Czechoslovakia during the time it was communist: |
Don't you mean during the time it existed? 
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Aro
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
Posts: 38
Location: Warsaw, Poland
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| Sat Feb 09, 2008 2:41 am A joke: echo of the cold war |
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| Aro wrote: | | You see the play on word here - "ate" and "8" are pronounced the same, but no numbers are pronounced the same as other words in Polish. Because we had our Cartoon Network "Polished", there is a translation for this, but it's rubbish, and the joke is not really funny. You could change the joke into something completly different. I mean, change the meaning and the whole "plot", so to speak, but that's not a translation, that's a cultural adaptation, or, simply a new joke created. |
But very often what you call a cultural adaptation is actually a completely equivalent joke that evokes exactly the same image in the listener. In that joke I wrote about the moel, there is the double meaning of "tips" as extra money and as the end of the child's thingie that comes off after circumcision, and the Czech language doesn't have that. However, you can translate it with a certain expression that means something like, "But I get to keep everything that's left." You wind up with exactly the same double meaning, and the dual image of a waiter and a circumciser.
As for cartoons, part of the problem can be that they don't hire the best translators and don't give them time. I sometimes watch "King of the Hill" in Spanish, just to see how jokes are translated. A lot of the jokes are simply not translated, leaving one to assume that they CAN'T be translated. However, I give the same puns and gags to Spanish and French speakers in a translation studies class, and they're always able to come up with some way of getting the same joke and double meaning across. They were even able to produce the TRIPLE meaning of the name of the department store in that cartoon show, which is "Megalomart". HOWEVER, when I first present them with the problem, and I haven't analyzed the triple meaning with them yet, they simply produce something to the effect of "very big department store". It takes time and thought, and translators don't always take the time or expend the effort.
Also, a cultural adaptation IS a type of translation. I know that a lot of technical manuals can't be translated word for word from English into German, because the Germans have such different training than Americans that they would be insulted if the translation were not culturally adapted. However, the German text gets exactly the same message across and induces the same behavior in Germany as the English version does in the States.
| Aro wrote: | | Another example I find really brilliant (not only as regard to translation/untranslatability, but as a funny phrase in general) is a line in "Unce upon a Time in Mexico", when Johnny Depp asks some latino thug: "Are you a Mexican or a Mexican’t?". Again, impossible to translate maintaining the same meaning, sense, and similar play on words. |
I think you're wrong about that one also. In a typical Slavic language, you could do it by using the adjective for Mexican and the word for "man", and then some form of the verb for "can", which will usually have the same or nearly the same sound. You'd have to play around with the grammatical cases and suffixes a bit, but I'm convinced you could do it.
| Aro wrote: | And one more thing:
| Jamie (K) wrote: | | Here's a joke from Czechoslovakia during the time it was communist: |
Don't you mean during the time it existed? |
It still existed for a few years after it stopped being communist. |
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Jamie (K)
I'm a Communicator ;-)
Joined: 24 Feb 2006
Posts: 4337
Location: Detroit, Michigan, USA
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| Sun Feb 10, 2008 16:23 pm A joke: echo of the cold war |
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OK, I get your porint(s). However, when you're doing a cultural adaptation, and I do agree that it's a part/branch of translation, the results are quite different. I mean, you have joke about something in the source language and you produce a joke about something completly different in the target language. How accurate is that? Being creative and having bright ideas as far as cultural adaptations are concerned, for me, is still not enough to do well on a particular translation. For example, when you have a joke/sketch/whetever about, say, flowers, and you translate/adapt it into a joke about, say, aminals - it's not the same. Sure, it sounds good, the target audience is happy, however the meaning/context changed. And you have to be very careful with things like that because you can interfere in "art" (and by that I mean the original cript) and you can in a way violate it. Know what I mean? I can't explain it well as it's really complex and confusing (at least for me). And when it comes to translating movies, you don't have much free choices when you deal with "untranslatability" (inverted commas on purpose) because you have to preserve the context etc.
As far what you've written about Mexican't, I don't quite follow... Maybe I didn't understand you completly, but you seem to sound, as if it's so easy "think of a word, play with suffix, make a similar sounding equivalent"... You see, there are many ways to deal with this one. You can say something like Meksypopapraniec (which would more or less mean "Mexcian scum"), or many other ways, but I just can't think of any sutiable offence, including the word "Mexican" (or at least the ethnicity), that would fit here. I'm from Poland and that's a Slavic country (by the way, I was taught you should say Slavonic instead of Slavic - what's the correct version an how do they differ?), but I can't think of variable "can" and the play on suffixes. I don't know how it was translated because I watched it in English, but I do consider getting in touch with the company thattranslated it and see how they dealt with it...
Anyway, there's one thing I wanted to ask you. You seem to be of the opinion that humour untranslatability doesn't exist, or at least that it's not a big issue at all, as if it's "overrated" or something like that. Correct me if I'm wrong.
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Aro
I'm new here and I like it ;-)
Joined: 18 Dec 2007
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Location: Warsaw, Poland
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