Domesticating the Translator : A Comparative Analysis of Humour in Yasmina Reza’s Dieu du Carnage and God of Carnage

Abstract

The article reviews the challenges facing translators of humour and of drama. They must identify and experience humour, and then re-create it so that it will not only be acceptable to the target audience, but amusing on stage. Such challenges have undoubtedly been met in the case of Yasmina Reza’s Dieu du carnage (2007), whose success in Britain and America can be attributed to Reza’s regular translator, Christopher Hampton. However faced with Reza’s doubts about the English translation of «Art», the play which made her famous on the British and American stage, the translator seems to have adopted a more cautious and less creative approach for God of Carnage. Such is the result of a comparison of verbal humour between the original and the translation. There is domestication, not so much of the text, but of the translator himself.