Humor and Translation: Cultural Implications

This chapter deals with the complexity of translating humor from one language to another highlighting the fact that translational difficulties are not limited to language alone but also on cultural references that are only typical of the lingua-cultural community of the original exemplar. Translation is extremely relevant in the present-day world in which English has become a lingua franca, and humor couched in English is widely adopted in diverse the media where non-native speakers may be bereft of the cultural context required to understand it. This bias towards humor in English and its ubiquity means that languages other than English require translation to be seen and to occupy a place on the global stage. So far, the topic of humor translation has been mainly studied in literary disciplines which have focused on issues related to equivalence and translatability but currently, as humor and debates concerning humor occupy more space within the public sphere, it follows that its translation gains importance in diverse subfields of media studies, advertising, digital humanities and, above all, computer mediated communication. The ability for a robot to understand, create and translate contextual humor remains one of the toughest challenges in artificial intelligence.