Abstracts Language, Literature, and Linguistic

A cultural linguistics approach to humour translation: a Persian study

by Sajjad Kianbakht

This study explores the complexities of translating the humour present in literary texts. It focuses on the analysis of the interplay of humour's underlying conceptual dimensions that are culturally constructed. More precisely, drawing on a cultural linguistics analytical framework (Sharifian, 2017a, 2017b) and the general theory of verbal humour (GTVH) framework (Attardo, 2002, 2008; Attardo & Raskin, 1991), this research study provides a comparative textual analysis of the translation of humour in a corpus of humorous passages. The study also identifies the translation methods used by the translators to resolve the problems of translating humour in the corpus, and it uncovers the factors that might have governed the translators' decisions through conducting semi-structured written interviews (O'Brien & Saldanha, 2014). Moreover, the study discusses the analytical tools of cultural conceptualisations, including cultural schemas, cultural metaphors, and cultural categories commonly used in literary texts, which have not yet received enough attention in the translation of humour (Sharifian, 2016a; Stankic, 2017). The findings of this study indicate that the texts draw upon various types of cultural conceptualisations underlying linguistic components to create humour. The underlying cultural conceptualisations that lay behind linguistic components were lost in translation.