Performance and Translation in the Arabic Metalinguistic Joke

Abstract

This research explores dynamic equivalence in interlinguistic (Arabic to English) and intersemiotic translation (oral performance into text) with reference to the Arabic metalinguistic joke – a self-referring genre of humorous folklore that takes for its subject the rhetoric of its performance (defined as an “assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence” (Bauman 1977:11). This rhetoric is explored in terms of the emergent quality of performance, which is seen as the major factor in creating the desired dynamic, or rhetorical, equivalence in translation. Various aspects of the rhetoric of performance are explored, touching on linguistic and cultural issues. Translation is seen as an enabling factor in the comparative study of culture, and vice versa. The representative jokes discussed articulate certain themes with apparently ‘universal’ currency, such as the anxiety associated with language use in the Arabic diglossic and multilingual context, fear of feminization, loss of authenticity, Arabicization, and others. The thrust of the analysis is to support the stress on culture as a basic analytical category in translation studies.