La storia con il testo
HostThey say the true test of a translator is a joke. Helen, Daniel, you've both translated comic novels. Is that fair?
HelenEntirely. A description of a sunset survives translation more or less intact. A pun doesn't. It depends on an accident of one particular language, two meanings happening to share a sound, and that accident almost never repeats itself elsewhere.
DanielWhich means you're not really translating the joke; you're replacing it. The question becomes: what is this joke doing in the story? Is it revealing character, releasing tension, mocking someone? If you keep the function, you can afford to lose the words.
HostDoesn't that risk the translator inserting themselves too much?
HelenIt's a constant tension. I once spent three days on a single line of wordplay about a fish, and in the end I invented a completely different pun about a bird. Purists were horrified. But a reader of the translation laughed in the same place as a reader of the original, which, to my mind, is a kind of fidelity.
DanielPuns are actually the easier case, in a way, because everyone can see the problem. What's harder is humour that depends on shared cultural knowledge: a reference to a television advert from the nineteen eighties, say, or a particular tone of bureaucratic language that every native reader instantly recognises as absurd. Explain it in a footnote and you've killed it.
HelenExactly. Nothing is less funny than an explained joke. Sometimes the honest choice is to let one go and compensate elsewhere, adding a touch of wit in a passage where the original was flatter.
DanielCompensation is the translator's secret weapon. You're not balancing every sentence, you're balancing the whole book.
