(De)constructing humour across languages and genres.

In western societies humour appears in many different communicative events, and is variedly expressed through words, pictures, sounds and body language. Humour is peculiar in that it is creative, compelling, culture-specific, and produces effects that go beyond the ‘humour feeling’ aroused by a witty remark or a funny situation (Vandaele 2002:151-154). Moreover, humour appreciation does not always go hand in hand with the ability to (re-)produce it successfully (Vandaele 2002: 150, 169). These are arguably some of the reasons why humour presents an exciting challenge to translation, whatever its position may be on the acceptability-adequacy continuum in the target language (Toury 1995). After introducing the conceptual structure of humour put forward by Jeroen Vandale (2002), I will firstly analyse a sample of multi-modal non-literary texts produced either in England or Italy, as an exercise in decoding the ‘multiple’ meaning of humour (Vandaele 2002: 156) in the Enlish/Italian translation classroom. I will then examine the ‘convergent similarity’ (see Chesterman 2007) between the way humour is expressed in Jeanette Winterson’s novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the Italian translation Non ci sono solo le arance (There Are Not Only Oranges) by Maria Ludovica Petta. In this translation-oriented case study I compare the (re-)encoding of humour across languages and cultures with a view to heightening translation students’ awareness of the linguistic constraints and options involved in reproducing humour. It is suggested that the insights gained by the contextualised analysis of humour across genres and languages provide translators with an increased awareness of the specific meaning of humour in a variety of text types and a basis for the examination and assessment of their own target texts.