What translation techniques do you employ while translating humor?

Question:

What translation techniques do you employ while translating humor?

I'm expected to write a piece of work about how translating English humor works. I'm to include translation techniques that are made use of in the process, as well as the most often problems that may occur while rendering.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker:

Hmmm ... interesting question. Well, here are a couple of problems ...

1) Puns and wordplays in English don't translate well into foreign languages, and vice versa. For your listeners to get the joke, they'll probably have to have more knowledge of the other tongue than you can reliably count on them having.

2) Jokes that depend on cultural references may not translate well, if at all. The reference might not exist in the other culture, or it might be called something else.

For example, I know a pretty good naughty joke that refers to "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater" **and** I speak Spanish. But if I'm going to try to tell that joke to some friends in Mexico, I need to make sure that people there have heard of that nursery rhyme AND that the character in that rhyme is called Peter (or Pedro or Pepe, as it were). If either of those isn't true, and I just tell the joke by directly translating it from English into Spanish, it'll fall flat.

I guess what it comes down to is you have to work a lot harder to make sure you know your audience ... which is a good general practice in all writing and public speaking, not just translating jokes.

Hope that helped a little! :-)