Humour Translation in the Digital Age

Smart technology has simplified communication between people around the world in a way that would have been unimaginable even as recently as a decade ago. A consequence of this newly found ease of communication between speakers of different languages who are separated only by a keyboard and a screen, has led to strengthening the role of English as a common and international language. It therefore follows that many instances of humour on line appear to generate from English. In fact, the prominence and social standing of English today makes it the primary language of humour online by default. Internet memes, that seem to have overtaken traditional jokes as humorous tropes in everyday interaction, mostly come from western sources, or more precisely, from templates based on fragments of US culture. It thus follows that more English humour undergoes translation into other languages and therefore goes viral, than vice versa. It is unusual for humour from other languages/cultures to go viral too when the fonts of global humour epidemics are principally disseminated from English language sources. The verbal and cultural options upon which on-line humour is created are identical to those that exist in the real world and so are translational strategies. There is no reason not to translate humour for languages other than English, but at present there does not appear to be the will to do so.