Lucky Jim and Apostrophes

A few weeks ago, I read the humorous novel Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis. The novel satirizes various aspects of academia and related situations, but one of the most comic parts, to my mind anyway, was when the cab Jim Dixon and Christine Callaghan are in drives up to a petrol station. Here is the sentence: “Behind these [petrol pumps] was an unlit building with a painted sign, faintly visible, reading Car’s for Hire – Batesons – Repair’s.” (page 138 in the edition printed by Victor Gollancz, London)

Why is this funny? Because of the horrible apostrophe usage! Many users of English have trouble with apostrophes, but in general, it’s pretty simple: you use an apostrophe for possessives, but not for plurals (yes, I’m leaving out contractions, and the fact that the word “its” is possessive, not plural, in order to focus on the major area of confusion). So the sign in Lucky Jim should actually read Cars for Hire – Bateson’s – Repairs.

As a copy editor, punctuation is very important to me. I have special feelings in particular for the apostrophe and the serial comma, and I’m a big fan of them both. Those of you interested in apostrophes might enjoy the Apostrophe Protection Society’s website, and those of you who don’t think you’re interested should check it out anyway. You might learn (or re-learn) a few thing’s, I mean, things.

The Humor (and Poetics!) of Mistranslations

While reading Walter Nash’s The Language of Humour: Style and Technique in Comic Discourse, I noticed a short passage on mistranslations. Mr. Nash refers to the humor that can come from the “excessively literally or misguidedly ambitious” translation. Surely we’ve all sniggered at poor translations in users’ manuals for items manufactured in other countries or while on vacation, whether in hotel rooms or on menus. Maybe some of us have even attempted to politely inform the managers of the restaurants or hotels that the translation was not correct. What’s interesting is that these mistranslations can inspire artists, as in the poem by Robert Graves referred to by Mr. Nash.

Apparently Mr. Graves noticed a badly translated tourist guide and let himself be inspired by it:

«¡Wellcome, to the Caves of Arta!» by Robert Graves

‘They are hollowed out in the see-coast at the muncipal terminal of Capdepera at nine kilometer from the town of Arta in the Island of Mallorca, with a stuporizing infinity of graceful colums of 21 meter and by downward, which prives the spectator of all animacion and plunges in dumbness. The way going is very picturesque, serpentine between style mountains, til the arrival at the esplanade of the vallee called «The Spiders». There are good enlacements of the railroad with autobuses of excursion, many days of the week, today actually Wednesday and Satturday. Since many centuries renown foreing visitors have explored them and wrote their elegy about, included Nort-American geoglogues.’ [From a tourist guide]

Such subtile filigranity and nobless of construccion
Here fraternise in harmony, that respiracion stops.
While all admit thier impotence (though autors most formidable)
To sing in words the excellence of Nature's underprops,
Yet stalactite and stalagmite together with dumb language
Make hymnes to God wich celebrate the stregnth of water drops.

¿You, also, are you capable to make precise in idiom
Consideracions magic of ilusions very wide?
Already in the Vestibule of these Grand Caves of Arta
The spirit of the human verb is darked and stupefied;
So humildy you trespass trough the forest of the colums
And listen to the grandess explicated by the guide.

From darkness into darkness, but at measure, now descending
You remark with what esxactitude he designates each bent;
«The Saloon of Thousand Banners», or «The Tumba of Napoleon»,
«The Grotto of the Rosary», «The Club», «The Camping Tent»,
And at «Cavern of the Organs» there are knocking strange formacions
Wich give a nois particular pervoking wonderment.

Too far do not adventure, sir! For, further as you wander,
The every of the stalactites will make you stop and stay.
Grand peril amenaces now, your nostrills aprehending
An odour least delicious of lamentable decay.
It is poor touristers, in the depth of obscure cristal,
Wich deceased of thier emocion on a past excursion day.

Translation Humor

We've discussed the translation of humor, but here is a website with translation- and language-related jokes, many based on bad translations.

Car Doesn’t Run? Try Translation!

The last post was on internationalization and I mentioned advertising as something that needs to be carefully translated. I heard about an example of bad advertising translation in regard to Coca-Cola. The soda company tried to translate its “Coke adds life” ad to Japanese and ended up with “Coke brings your ancestors back from the dead.” Slight difference there!

Careful translation isn’t just limited to ads, but also affects product names and the instructions for using said products. A well-known example is the Chevrolet Nova car, which didn’t sell well in Mexico, since “no va” means “it doesn’t go.” Bill Bryson featured a funny example of poorly translated instructions in his book “The Mother Tongue.” On a package of Italian food, he found, “Besmear a backing pan, previously buttered with a good tomato sauce, and, after, dispose the cannelloni, lightly distanced between them in an only couch.”

A Wall Street Journal article on the importance of translation and adaption offers the following statistics from a survey done by a translation company a few years ago: “Close to 50% simply tune out the message of an ad if it is poorly translated. About 65% said bad translations show a lack of caring about the consumer, while nearly a third said it would hinder their loyalty to a product.”

A company can’t afford to waste time, effort, and money on mistranslations. Consumers may laugh at bad translations of ads, product names, or instructions, but the real question is whether they ultimately will avoid the company’s products. Mistranslation simply “doesn’t go.”

Virginia Woolf on Translating Humor

In "The Common Reader," Virginia Woolf wrote that "humour is the first of the gifts to perish in a foreign tongue."

As I said in the last post, translating humor is difficult, but apparently Ms. Woolf was not hopeful about a translator's ability to accomplish this hard task.

Translating Humor

Ethics is an important subject, and one we’ll come back to, but for a total change of pace, here is an article I noticed about translating comedy.

Humor is especially tricky to translate not only because different people and different cultures find different things funny, but also because of the fact that languages work in different ways. As the author of the article points out, English vocabulary and grammar “allow for endlessly amusing confusions of meanings.” For example, it is easy to play around with “tale” and “tail” in English and to make a joke based on how the two words sound the same but have different meanings, but such a joke wouldn’t work in Swedish (or in many other languages), as the Swedish translations for those words are not so similar. Incidentally, this sort of linguistic complexity, or confusion, depending on your point of view, is one reason so many people find it difficult to learn English, especially in terms of spelling and pronunciation.

Word play and humor add so much to a text and sometimes can be truly essential to the story or document, but they are incredibly difficult to translate well. When it comes to translating humor, there are three main choices. A translator can leave a joke or word play out entirely, which then of course may affect the meaning of the work and/or cause other changes to have to be made to the text. Or a translator can retain the joke but translate it literally, so the humor is lost but the words are retained. A footnote could possibly be added here to explain what the joke means in the source language, especially if the humor is important to the text and to the reader’s understanding of it. Finally, a translator can adapt it to the target language, creating a somewhat similar atmosphere or sense. Obviously, a translator has to make such a decision on a case by case basis and there is no simple rule for how to deal with these kinds of situations.