Mehrdeutigkeit und Humor in der Übersetzung

Abstract

This paper is dedicated to the concept of ambiguity and humor as an intercultural phenomenon. In the first section, we introduce different concepts of the term humor in literature from the perspective of literary and cultural studies, psychology and cognitive linguistics. We attempt to show that the concept of humor and ambiguity of an intercultural and interlingual perspective may belong to the most difficult areas of translation theory. At the same time, humor and polysemy are the key concepts of a semantically and pragmatically based theory of translation. In the second section, we will briefly deal with the phenomena of humor and ambiguity from the psycholinguistic and cognitive point of view and thereby we try to analyze the difference between visuality and textuality of Shakespeare’s tragedy “Romeo and Juliet” in film and on stage. The third section of this paper is devoted to the phenomenon of interculturality and the interlingual translation of pragmatic and cognitive-semantic categories on the example of polysemy, vagueness, irony, pun, word play and joke (and its various strategies and conversational implicatures in the literary text). It is assumed that initially the validity of the Relevance criterion (Sperber & Wilson 2005) and the validity of the principle of cooperation are in play, even in a text that is commonly considered as ‘meaningless’. We want to prove the example of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake‘, demonstrating that even such a seemingly illegible or difficult text that has often been considered non transferable, in a certain pattern and its narrative potential of the storyline, in the dynamics and in the progression descends from and is determined by the VALIDITY of the criterion of relevance. In another part of this third section, we turn to the Elizabethan drama of Shakespeare and the novel Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais, Ulysses by James Joyce as well as the unforgettable Novel by Jaroslav Hašek Brave Soldier Švejk, showing how wit and irony work and can be translated.