\\ home
\\ resources
\\ events
\\ about

By Alexandra Girard

Puns are ubiquitous items of language that express wit and humour in a concise way. From advertising slogans through to classic literary work and news headlines, you can't escape them. Walter Redfern (in Puns, Blackwell, London, 1984) gives a pretty satisfying definition of the beast, saying: "To pun is to treat homonyms as synonyms". When it comes to actually translating the animal, that's another matter: such an enterprise entails high linguistic skills, sharp decision making (too many possible translations kill translation, and in the Internet era, the quickest is the best), creativity (rewriting) and broad cultural knowledge.

Adapt, don't translate
Play on words or puns epitomize what separates two languages and are a tricky mastermind for translators whose options often solely depend on the notion of intertextuality. This consists in attempting to make up for untranslatability through rewriting, and having to rely on other parts of the entire text as reference material to copy. The translator will have to fish for characteristics in the author's style throughout the whole text in order to reproduce this style and create text instead of actually just shifting from a language to another. The basic one to one equivalence method being irrelevant here, there is no other choice than to invent. But can this method still be called translation? The decision-making all depends on one's definition: does translation require absolute fidelity to the source text or is it more an adaptation or a transcreation, can the translator invent text in the original writer's style (how pretentious!) to make up for the untranslatable bits? (When) does the translator have the right to add or omit anything?

French philosopher and linguist Jacques Derrida* says: "Translation practises the difference between signifier and signified" and proposes as an exercise to try and transfer this simple quotation into English: "Oui, oui, vous m'entendez bien, ce sont des mots français". "Oui, oui, you are receiving me well, these are French words." Or "yes, yes, […] these are not French words"? Whatever solution, there's always a loss that "derails" translation.
Let's say puns are translatable but involve the inevitable loss of information at a certain level (entropy), whether this information is contained in the form or code (signifier) or in the content or message (signified).
* Derrida for beginners, by Collins & Mayblin, 1996, Icon Books.

What is translation?
So what is to be done? When the languages have common roots, whether purely linguistic or cultural, the task can prove difficult though possible. However, imagine translating from Chinese to Arabic. Mission: impossible.
Isn't there a school of thought arguing that any translated work cannot render the subtlety of the original language, let alone the full message? "Traduttore tradittore" (translator, traitor) say the Italians. And as another example, newly converted Muslims whose first language is not Arabic are recommended to read the Holy Koran in the original version so that the message of God shall be understood in its entirety. It's because form and content are so intimately linked in the sacred words that there is no way to render this relationship, which actually forms the rhythm of the text, through another language, however good the translation may be.
Following this theory, Shakespeare would have been known only to the English-speaking world but thanks to creative translators who demystified literature as much as the original author, the text could be reworked and Shakespeare's wit rendered in as many languages as possible.

These reflections are also valid for the translation of poetry, which in itself is a play on words and "what gets lost in translation" (according to Robert Frost). This is proven in the highly recommended Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas F. Hofstadter*, where he enters an ever-open quest for the ideal English translation of a French poem by Marot and finds himself literally lost through a maze of possibilities with more than 88 potential translations. The author elegantly points out that an anagram for Translation is Lost In An Art.
* 1997, Harpers & Collins.

A good way to verify the acceptability of a translation is perhaps to work it reversibly even if this exercise proves fastidious and not always efficient: translate the text and retranslate it towards the source language, and check the value of your work. Let's look at the first sentence of French writer Raymond Queneau (the champion of puns in French classical literature) in his most famous novel, Zazie dans le Métro: - "Keskipudonktan" standing for "Qu'est ce qui pue donc tant?", is cleverly rendered by Barbara Wright as "Howcanaystinksotho" for "how can they stink so though?". Following the reverse translation method however, the English version would have been way different from the creative adaptation that is this official translation. Behind every translator who overcomes the difficulties of puns, there is a potential mini Shakespeare, for their linguistic skills count as much as their talent for writing.
* Zazie in the Metro, by Raymond Queneau (1959), translated by Barbara Wright (1960), Penguin Books.

And last but not least, we could open another debate as to equivalences with this last example: "How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?" for there are lots of similar expressions in French whose interest lies not so much in the meaning but in the form. After all, it is ideas we translate, not words. There is no valid method, or golden rule to translate puns. The best asset for the translator is their faith in the possibility of the task. To conclude, try translating the following joke in as many language pairs as possible, and feel free to send your versions to the email address below:

• "Don't you know the King's English?"
• "No Sir, is he?"

Alexandra Girard (alexandragirard@hotmail.com) is a freelance translator (DipTrans IoL) and is actively preparing her Masters Degree workbook on: "Translatability & Untranslatability of Puns in Raymond Queneau's Le Vol d'Icare" between French and English.

back to top