Humorous miniature as material and means for teaching translation.

Abstract

The paper deals with one of the pressing problems of modern translation, namely, the reproduction of humor, the latter being the utmost exponent of national identity. The humorous miniatures are viewed both as a material and means for teaching translation, as far as they make it possible to quickly and effectively actualize students’ knowledge in rendering ethnical, cultural, and cognitive issues in practical translation. It is shown that the inadequate humor rendering, namely, students’ English-Ukrainian translations of a religious anecdote, containing realia common for the source and target cultures, depends on the language and cultural issues of the source text, as well as its interpreter’s expertness and skill. Thus, the study shows definite source language units that resist purely formal interpretation (religious vocabulary and proper names, wordplay, stylistically marked epithets etc.) as well as the drawbacks of target language implementation of the young translators’ on-the-spot decisions (unspeakable phonetic clusters, dubious sense, stylistic inconsistencies etc.). The former shows the challenges of the source text, the latter – the thesaurus lacunae, possible to be filled in case of (1) proper pre-translation analysis for the selection of the aforementioned source text challenges and (2) the development of proper translation skills on stylistic, lexical, phonetic and other language levels. The other issue this and further our studies cover is the reproduction of the ethnically, culturally and cognitively marked aspects of the comic miniature texts (anecdotes, motivators, demotivators etc.) in translation, namely, the interpretation of common religious notions within both source and target cultures. The paper stresses the importans of the construction of the intellectual manifestations of laughter hierarchy, the separation of humor among other categories of comic - irony and sarcasm - and its division into situational, linguistic and ethnically specific ones. The authors believe that this pragmatic approach will also contribute to the adequate interpretation and appropriate perception of the text by the target audience.