3.Related studies and theories

Cultural translation is a process of carrying the meaning of words that are well-known to one society due to various factors such as history, culture, or even syntactic rules to another society that never had to establish that kind of concept before.

In anthropology, cultural translation plays an important role in learning the differences among people from distinctive societies because it has its own secret pattern. The cultural translation process starts when two people from different societies have a similar existential concept that creates the same kind of conceptual cognitive frame. Then, as they have similar kinds of thinking processes, the word they use would be comprehendible thus, those who never have this concept might translate the word consciously or unconsciously (Asad, 1986). Moreover, anthropologists in the past also used cultural translation in their works in order to understand tribes’ people both by using an assumption of the rough idea of words concept (Lienhardt 1953,) and interpretation of a member’s words in an ethnic group (Geertz, 1973). With the latter approach, an original concept will be conserved because it does not interfere with the background of the words. On the other hand, the later study argues that assuming the rough idea of a concept can distort the original concept since it could overlook the background of the words (Conway, 2012).

The significance of cultural translation became even more clear in the modern age, people come to live in a multicultural society. Multiculturalism leads human societies to integrate knowledge, history, politics, and the concept of each unique society together. Whether race or language, people from different communities have a reason to contradict the opposing side. without a medium, having different attributes causes multiculturism to be difficult because all communities want to keep their own legacy of history and culture. Cultural translation is needed to create a common ground for every community in order to understand a diverse concept. Therefore, cultural translation, as a medium, supports the ideology of a united world; the place where people have mutual benefits and mindset to develop the world together (Buden et al, 2009).

The gaps between cultures sometimes are not easily seen as they are innate concepts of one’s culture. The cultures which can be perceived through physical sensations are called ‘surface cultures’ while on the other hand ‘deep cultures’ are abstract concepts. Both deep culture and surface culture are embedded in their language unconsciously. Therefore, translators should be prepared to handle cultural problems too. Surface cultures are less difficult for translating, however, translators need to be concerned with connotations inside translated words. One’s culture sees the gesture of thumb up as to show appreciation while one’s culture sees them as an insult. Furthermore, the language of each country has its own identity. Some societies might have more addressing terms due to their social class system. Therefore, translators must be wary of these gaps of cultures too (Pinmanee, 2019). Hence humor is one of the elements that are difficult to transfer between languages.

Humor is a pragmatic action involving communication skills such as speech, gesture, or visual imagery with the intention of building amusement. The fundamentals of humor rely on surprise elements by giving an audience one cognitive frame with any sort of presentation, then suddenly changing that cognitive frame to create enjoyment or even laughter (Beeman,1999).

The requirement for humor to work is the same as any other communication tool which is an understanding of the same concept. Every joke cannot be conveyed successfully if an audience does not understand a new cognitive frame presented. Therefore, those who intend to create amusement must assume pre-existing knowledge of the audience in order to prepare efficient jokes. However, two reasons explain why the jokes may fail to create amusement. The first one is that the jokebecomes offensive. One of the elements to create enjoyment through surprise is satire thus, with a wrong presentation method, a joke can be offensive to the audience. Another reason is that it is not surprising enough. This may be due to the audience do not has the same common knowledge (Beeman, 1999).

Moreover, humor is more complex than just mere laughter. According to the article by Vandaele (2010), many social animals have laughter as a primitive contagious social act. When one of them made the call other will imitate it automatically. This article disagrees that the core of humor is not just a surprising element since that is just a factor for laughter. Human humor relates to symbolically created, uncertainty and insight so that people can create a friendly social act with each other. Therefore, humor always sticks with the implication of one’s culture.

Regardless of the disagreement, both of them suggest the same idea that a sense of humor is associated with society; the understanding of a certain concept but presenting it at uncertain timing. Nevertheless, even if the encoder and decoder have a common ground for the concept, jokes can still be failed in creating amusement. When it comes to transcultural communication, jokes are bound to be unsuccessfully conveyed in another language. Therefore, mediators of cultures such as translators should have the tools to handle this particular problem appropriately.

Humorous text is one of the challenges that have been an obstacle to all translators for ages. The untranslatability leaves a question of whether jokes can be translated into a new culture or not. Some researchers might say that due to the difference in socio-culture, linguistic rules, or even denotation of words, some jokes are not supposed to be translated in an equal manner. For instance, the homophone jokes in Thai are not translated well into English.

Question: วันอะไรไม่ควรสระผม? Answer: วันพฤหัสบดี! in English

Question: Which day we shouldn’t wash our hair?

Answer: Thursday!

The word [washing hair] (Sa-) in Thai is the fourth syllable of the word [Thursday] (Pha-rue-had-sa-bor-di) which combines the word into “in Thursday shouldn’t wash our hair”. This requires a deep level of Thai language understanding since Thai people call Thursday by both [Pha-rue-had-sa-bor-di] and [Pha-rue-had] to cut the word short. Also, the syllable [Bor] is a Thai dialect word that means not while the syllable [di-] means good. Such specific context cannot be expressed well in TL but many people have searched for methods to solve challenges like this.

According to Low (2011), a joke is a tool to express humor verbally which might be conveyed by figurative, such as understatement, absurdity, paradox, or juxtaposition. A pun is a wordplay to create an unexpected feeling by having an ambiguous meaning. pun mainly uses homophones, homonyms, and homographs in order to create the surprise element.

Puns and cultural context jokes are the most problematic for translators. Since one’s language is interconnected with socio-culture in many aspects, translating humor completely is impossible. Puns involve connotation and denotation so as to translate them in every aspect the TL would have the same semantics and denotation which rarely happens.

However, Attardo (2002) researched the theory to help in categorizing jokes in many factors. This theory is the General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH). The theory proposes to assist translators to sort out the jokes by using 6 factors which are called ‘knowledge resources’. The knowledge resources to categorize jokes are (1) language (2) narrative strategies (3) target (4) situation (5) logical mechanism (6) script opposition. The language knowledge resource shows all the information about the joke verbally. The narrative strategy knowledge resource involving with a narrative procedure such as knock-knock jokes. The target knowledge resource is about using verbal aggression on a specified target. The logical mechanism knowledge resource involves assuming local logic from the speaker’s side to start an action. Lastly, the script opposition knowledge involves two opposite situations created to setting ambiguous verbal. In conclusion, in this thesis, the theory can be used when categorizing jokes before translation to get the result of which category would be appropriate for each technique.

After translating source texts, each of the texts will be classified with techniques of the related theories which are Mona Baker strategies (1992) and Vinay & Darbelnet’s translation techniques (1958).

Mona Baker’s Strategies

• Translation by a more general word

• Translation by a more neutral/ less expressive word

• Translate by cultural substitution

• Translating using a loan word

• Translating paraphrase using a related word

• Translating paraphrase using an unrelated word

• Translating by omission

• Translating by illustration

• Using an idiom of similar meaning and form

• Using an idiom of similar meaning but dissimilar form

Vinay & Darbelnet Translation Techniques

• Borrowing

The technique uses the foreign term in the target text for the purpose of stylistics or it could be assumed that the word shares the same exact construct idea.

• Calque

Calque is a special kind of borrowing technique that keeps the original meaning and some elements of the source text but express in a different way.

• Transposition

Transposition involves changing the grammatical structure of the source text without changing the meaning of the text.

• Modulation

Modulation involves changing the perspective of the message of the text without violating the source text message.

• Equivalence

Equivalence reforms a word from the source language into an appropriate equivalence word from target language.

• Adaptation

Adaptation is the technique which use when the source text displays a culture that is unknown to the target language so a new situation must be created to make a more familiar target text.

Previous studies

The analysis of translating jokes has been conducted by: Popa (2005) article, entitled “Joke and Translation”. In her work, the aim is to prove that jokes can be translated and not just a linguistic challenge like another researcher had proposed. This study used theories of Han’s Vermeer’s skopos and Christiane Nord’s functionalist approach to translation. The skopos theory has been chosen specifically due to the main purpose of determining the purposes of translation. The result of her analysis shows that jokes can be translated. The difficulties of translating jokes might occur because of subjective translation problems from translators. The main point of translating jokes is that translators must be able to present ‘secret’ agreement to the decoder. If translators are unable to create new elements while only projecting source text cultural concepts, the joke will build awkwardness and culture shock instead. While this study can prove that jokes can be translated, the equivalences between ST and TT are still large. The absolute solution to joke translation is yet to find, there will always be source language jokes and translated texts.

Furthermore, another article that has been conducted by Ptaszyński and Mickiewicz (2010), entitled “on the (un)translatability of jokes”. Their study aims to prove whether the methods of Catford, Ke, and Toury are compatible with the translatability of polish jokes into English or not. Each approach is chosen due to the different aspects like linguistic-culture oriented, source-target oriented, and point of time for translation study. The analysis process is part into two stages. First, present a polish joke with a language-dependent and combined joke then discuss of translatability of the joke as the three methods chosen. The translatability will be relevant to the source language features. The result of this study shows that Catford’s method covers only some cases. The method has problems with code-switching and dialect jokes. Ke method can be applied to most jokes, however, the method might interrupt the purpose of the joke which is creating amusement. It is impossible to explain every joke in an annotation manner. Toury’s method provided the most varied result. The only possible translatable for this method is an international joke. None of the methods can be used to the fullest efficiency for the translatability of polish jokes into English but, still, it provided broader results of what is the problem.

Both studies have a parallel goal and result that they want to find the principles to be tools for translators to translate jokes. Since the matter at hand is languages, there are difficult to find suitable principles for all languages. Therefore, studies that can broader the problem of the untranslatability of jokes should be demanded.