The amateur translation of humour on the basis of The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski - Диссертация

The last part of the first chapter will be devoted to the problem with translation. This specific section will be built on the works by Delabastita (1996) (cited in Ghanooni 2012), Kalaga (1997), Mateo (1995) and Olbrects-Tyteca (1974) (cited in Attardo 1994). The second chapter will consist of three main parts. Corpus feature of this paper will contain information about the author of The Witcher series, Andrzej Sapkowski. Moreover, this section will provide information about the translators of the books, their motives and way of work. The subsequent section of this thesis called ‘Quantitative analysis’ will describe the proportions of the several types of humour that were present in the analysed material. ‘Qualitative analysis’ will be the last section of the second chapter of this paper. It will be devoted to the analysis of several examples of translation of humour from The Witcher. The source text and the target text will be compared in order to achieve a valuable analysis and assessment of the translation. This paper will try to answer a certain stereotype of amateur translation. Should it be stigmatised as an unprofessional work that is imperfect or even botched? Do we need amateur translation when we have professionals, who are trained to translate properly? Of course there is a question of necessity of a translation. Amateur translation is prepared often when a text does not exist in the target language or it will be translated in the nearest future, but the fans do not want to wait for such a long time to read the destinies of their favourite characters. Is it forgivable to release an amateur translation of a book just because of these inducements? Can a professional translation be compared to the amateur one? Is it possible that a group of amateur translators will overcome a trained translator? The analysis in the second chapter of this thesis will try to answer these questions. humour translation sapkowski pun Chapter 1. Humour and the idiosyncrasy of wordplay translation This chapter will present the concept of humour and several aspects that are closely related to the idea of humour, namely: concept of humour presented by vast amount of scholars, several humorous devices, most popular victims of humour, types of jokes, a brief description of wordplay and puns with several pun categories, a short section devoted to irony, and last, but not least, various problems with humour translation. 1.1 Concept of humour Humour as a broad concept, should be properly presented in order to distinguish several definitions of humour provided by different scholars. It is almost impossible to define such a thing as humour, as it is an individual way of thinking that makes a person smile or laugh. Linguists, psychologists, and anthropologists categorized humour as a blanket category, which covers multiple aspects such as a joke, a laughter or a feeling that something is funny (Attardo 1994). Chateau (1950) observes that humour ought to be opposite to seriousness and not to tragedy (cited in Attardo). In some cases, humour (or in this case, comedy) is defined, here by Gourevitch (1975), as “(…) a miscellaneous genre activated by plurality of impulses: farce, humor, satire, and irony” (cited in Attardo). Aubouin (1948), tried to distinguish humour and the ridiculous by looking at its structural factors and by the absence of resolution of the latter (cited in Attardo 1994). Categorizing humour into subject matter (aggressive, scatological, sexual) was a point made by some psychologists focused on substantialist theory (Attardo 1994). Forabosco (1992) made an attempt to differentiate humour and incongruity as well as resolution, and humour only consisting incongruity. Furthermore, they are not willing to be offended or to take a joke personally as well as they will not be thinking about a double meaning of a joke. Van Limpt describes this kind of reader as “enjoying a cool glass of iced tea in a sunny, green garden in the middle of a long summer holiday”. Raskin (1985) distinguished and classified various kinds of humour: ridicule, deliberate ridicule, affectionate ridicule, humour at the speaker’s own expense, self-disparaging humour, riddles, conundrums and puns, and suppression/repression humour.