1.Prologue

HOW JOKES COULD BE FUNNY IN ANOTHER LANGUAGE?

Cultural Translation: The techniques of conveying American humorous text into Thai

from the television series “The Office”

Synopsis of this study

From the point of view of the translation field, jokes are one of the most difficult challenges translators have to face. 'Joke' is categorized in the branch of cultural translation since it needs more than just its meaning to deliver amusement. Jokes can be packed full of unintentional knowledge. Therefore, people from different backgrounds would surely not get the joke at first glance. Consequently, experts in the field of translation always trying to find appropriate approaches to this problem.

Cultural translation constantly pursues an issue of differences in language denotation and context as dialect, food, or architecture. Therefore, techniques to avoid misunderstanding in cultural translation are needed. One of the issues of cultural translation includes translating humorous text that requires an understanding of the source culture. Jokes have plenty of tools to express like understatement, paradox, absurdity, juxtaposition, and others. However, most verbally expressed are not wordplay since they can use directly (Low, 2011). The major problem of translating humorous text is the challenge of making readers feel amused. Thus, the translator should have widespread knowledge of either source or target culture to build amusement.

Therefore, currently, there are some of the main problems of cultural translating of humorous texts are found by other people involved in the translation field. According to Low (2011), the problem with translating jokes is that jokes are difficult to translate into equally amusing substitutes and some of them completely requires knowledge of language proficiency in the source language or even source culture. Marco (2022) also states that puns are a “roadblock” to the translation process because the target language cannot be expressed in the same way as the source language. Moreover, some figures of speech cannot translate well into a target language.