Translating Humour – A Didactic Perspective

Humour has various faces and forms, deriving from double meanings, situations, wordplay, often with hidden or obvious cultural references. It may also be subjective; the same things may seem humorous for some people and not funny at all for others. Probably most translators would agree that translating humour is definitely a very challenging task, especially when it is strictly related to the language itself or to a certain culture or community. However, there are certain forms of humour, especially situational or anecdotal, which focus on universal aspects or elements of human life, and therefore may be understood and considered as funny by people from different cultures. In this study, we discuss some theories, principles, recommended techniques and strategies related to translating jokes, wordplay, and humorous idioms which in our opinion may be included in the translator-training curriculum. We also examine the strategies and techniques used by a group of translator trainees in their second year of studies in translating humour from English into Hungarian, focusing on the difficulties they encountered, in order to assess their needs and include more practice and useful tips in the training process.

Verbal Humour in Screen Translation: Officer Crabtree’s Case with the Fronch and Hungarian Longwodge

The present study aims to gain insight into the translation of audiovisual humour displayed in the verbal manifestations of Officer Crabtree, the fictional character in the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982–1992), especially focusing on its Hungarian dubbed version of the series. Being a research domain with insights from audiovisual translation (AVT), humour studies, and discourse analysis, the article introduces the reader to AVT, more particularly, to dubbing, to research carried out in the domain of audiovisual humour, and to humour studies, especially focusing on incongruity and superiority theory. These theoretical elements are applied in the analysis of the corpus comprising the English voice track as source text (ST) and its Hungarian counterpart as target text (TT), highlighting the humorous effects achieved in both of them and especially pointing at the creative solutions translators resorted to in rendering the idiosyncratically mangled English texts into Hungarian. The analysis aims to provide counterexamples to the frequent claim that verbal humour is untranslatable.

Hungarian Dialectology. From the Beginnings until the Division of Hungary (1920)

Dialect islands in Hungarian dialectology have been a marginalized segment of research. Although the very first observations on different Hungarian dialects appeared in the 17th century, a systematic and detailed monographic description of Hungarian dialect islands in the Carpathian Basin has not been published yet. As we can conclude, several important historical events happened, institutions and researchers emerged. All of them had a significant impact on this research area, and based on their emergence the research history of Hungarian dialect islands can be divided into different periods. With regard to the research history of Hungarian dialect islands in Romania, a research was conducted in 2019. The results showed that the research history of these islands cannot be understood without an adequate global image of the history of the Hungarian dialectology. Thus, the present article gives a general historical overview of the research on Hungarian dialects from the beginnings up until 1920, when, following the Treaty of Trianon, the Hungarian nation was divided into five different parts.

Raising Collocational Awareness with Humour

Despite the increased interest that collocations have received in EFL methodology lately, making language learners aware of these multiword constructions continues to represent a challenge for teachers. While there may be different ways of teaching collocations, finding activities that raise collocational awareness efficiently is no easy task. Collocational awareness can be defined as the ability of language learners (and users) to use and acknowledge word combinations in their entirety. Humour can be useful in this regard as it not only ensures a more relaxed atmosphere in the classroom but can also help students to acknowledge and remember specific linguistic structures (among them, also collocations) more easily. In line with Construction Grammar (Goldberg 1995, 1997, 2006), it is believed that collocations are to be treated as constructions, pairings of form with a specific meaning and varying degrees of predictability – teaching them as such can contribute to a better understanding and acquisition of these constructions. After offering a brief overview of the characteristics of collocations and reflecting on the possible advantages of using humour in class, the paper shows possible ways of teaching collocations with humour. The exercises and activities suggested focus on both the productive and receptive competence of language learners and also incorporate the necessary skills required in the language learning process: listening, reading, writing, and speaking.

Rendering Science Fiction, Culture, and Language While Translating Ready Player One

The amazing science fiction setting and plot depicted by Ernest Cline in his Ready Player One may constitute a real challenge to translators and subtitlers alike as his book was also turned into a movie by Steven Spielberg. We have collected hundreds of terms from the original book (2011), its Hungarian translation (2012), the Hungarian dubbed version (March 2018), the most popular Hungarian fansub (2018), and the professional subtitle (July 2018, from the same person who translated the script for the dubbing). Having classified the collected terms into various categories, we have managed to identify successful Hungarian renditions of cultural allusions from the 1980s (movies, books, videogames, shows, songs, characters, objects, vehicles, etc.).

The Role of Humour in Teaching: Teacher Training Students’ Image of Teacher and Views on Teaching

A common question in teacher training is what trace is left behind by (many years of) institutional learning, that is, what kind of teacher and teaching image a teacher candidate starts his or her preparation with. The main determinants of becoming a teacher are the experiences gained as a student. The source of their approach and views is personal school experience, which can influence their professional development. In our study, we will discuss how future teachers think about the relationship between humour and school, humour and education. In the initial phase of our study, we asked first-year teacher training students about good and bad teachers in order to gain an insight into their views on teachers’ personality and work. After this, we used metaphor analysis to investigate teacher characteristics/qualities that approached the concept of teacher to novel, humorous-playful images. In this phase of our study, we focused on what effective communication tools they have for dealing with tensions and conflicts and the role of humour and playfulness. Not only research (Tisljár 2011; Lazarus, Role, and Genga 2011) but also everyday experience proves that there are a lot of practices in humour that can be learnt and that can shape personality, logic, and memory. The personality of the teacher cannot be formed, or it is very difficult to form, so teacher training has the potential to assist teacher candidates in acquiring skills that help them develop students’ cognitive and affective abilities in a fun way.

V. Voiculescu’s Novel: A Modern Depository of the Traditional Beliefs

Part of a larger research, initially thought and written as an essay, our paper is a transdisciplinary approach on Elmar Salmann’s idea of the novel as the modern depository of humanity’s religious and philosophical legacy, which would otherwise not find a way to express itself nowadays. As a support, we are using the one and only novel of a profound religious Romanian writer – V. Voiculescu’s Zahei Orbul (Zahei the Blind) –, trying to reveal Jean-Luc Marion’s concept of “distance” but also Milan Kundera’s view regarding the matter as it is discussed in The Art of the Novel. As stated before, in our deductive approach, we are using Basarab Nicolesco’s “the hidden third”, the basic concept in transdisciplinary research. Our conclusion is that Voiculescu’s novel is constructed on the grounds of God’s “absence”, as He retreats in the “distance”. This “absence” is supported by a net of Christian symbols on which the modern world’s elements are being interwoven in Midrash style, as Constantin Jinga states.

The Relationship between Bokmål and Nynorsk Nowadays

The present paper deals with the present-day relationship between the two official languages of Norway, Bokmål and Nynorsk (actually two variants of the same language, Norwegian), examining how their equal status functions in reality in the Norwegian society, in the administration, in the educational system, in the everyday life, in the digital world, etc.