The Sound of Humor: Translation, Culture and Phonological Jokes Javier Francisco Muñoz Basols TESI DOCTORAL UPF / ANY 2012 DIRECTORS DE LA TESI Dr. Patrick Zabalbeascoa Terran Departament de Traducció i Ciències del Llenguatge, Universitat Pompeu Fabra Dra. Micaela Muñoz-Calvo Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Universidad de Zaragoza DEPARTAMENT DE TRADUCCIÓ I CIÈNCIES DEL LLENGUATGE Acknowledgements This dissertation is the culmination of many years of research and painstaking reflection on the topic of phonological humor from a global and multilingual perspective. First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to the informants who contributed to this study by providing phonological jokes in their native languages. Explaining the cultural and linguistic assumptions embedded in each joke, answering my questions, and helping translate the texts into English was far from easy. The process of collecting a corpus of jokes in over 30 languages was an arduous process, peppered with anecdotes that may sound like jokes themselves, and that in fact illustrate the challenging nature of conducting ethnographic research for a doctoral dissertation on humor. The settings ranged from a conversation about phonological jokes in Taiwanese while dancing at a party in a New York City skyscraper to jotting down jokes in Icelandic while hiking on a glacier, an ice axe in one hand and a notebook in another. Despite all the obstacles encountered during this process, the rewarding part of it was obtaining valuable data, which constitutes, to my knowledge, the only representative multilingual corpus of phonological jokes in existence to date. It was also extremely gratifying to see first-hand that humor possesses certain features that are common across many different languages and cultures. Consequently, I would like to thank: Noleen Turner (Afrikaans), Joana Garmendia Mújica (Basque), Dunja Fehimovic (Bosnian), Alex Iltchev (Bulgarian), Josep Soler-Carbonell, Silvia Xicola Tugas and Laura Soler González (Catalan), Ondrej Vlcek (Czech), Maria Funder and Luke Cohler (Danish), Anggreini Kasanan (Dutch), Philip Rosenberg and Michael Walters (English), Seppo Kittilä and Antti Kukkonen (Finnish), Emmanuel Dervaux, Pierrick Jentreau and Dàvid Uhlar (French), Daniela Omlor (German), Eftychios Frangedakis, Pandelis Mavrogiannis and Villy Tsakona (Greek), Gegerly Szabo (Hungarian), Snorri Valsson (Icelandic), Hisar Maruli Manurung (Indonesian), i Elisa Gironzetti and Elisa Moroni (Italian), Heeyoon Choi and Yurah Kim (Korean), Milos Stokuca (Macedonian), Lidun Hareide (Norwegian), Pawel Adrjan (Polish), Catarina Fouto (Portuguese), Ana Todea and Diana Revenco (Romanian), Andrei Malkov, Nathalie Manevich and Alex Winning (Russian), Maja Bozovic (Serbian), Barbara Pihler (Slovenian), Iván Céster, Gurutzeta Guillera, José Joaquín Lahoz, Andrés Paúl Muñoz, Miguel Peinado, Yolanda Pérez Sinusía, Félix Sanjuan and Daniel Valls (Spanish), Marcus Nilssen and Coco Norén (Swedish), Pasuree Luesakul (Thai), Cem Inaltong (Turkish), and many others whom I only met briefly without a chance to register their names properly. I would also like to thank friends who have helped to find other informants for this study; most especially, José Joaquín Lahoz and Gurutzeta Guillera, who perfectly understand the importance of carrying out fieldwork and have gathered examples from speakers of several languages, and Satoko Kadowaki for her help with the Japanese side of my research. Given how jokes function in Japanese society, as explained in the last chapter, it was a real challenge to find evidence of phonological humor in this language. I would also like to thank Carol Weston for her feedback and for answering my questions, as well as for offering me an author’s invaluable perspective on the translation of some of her books, and María Rox Barasoain and Ana Cris Cruz Hurtado for sharing a common passion for doing research on humor while we were doctoral students. I would like to thank my co-directors for academic guidance. I am grateful to Dr. Micaela Muñoz-Calvo at the University of Zaragoza for her enthusiasm and constant encouragement since I first enrolled in her doctoral course on the translation of humor, one of the first steps toward the completion of this dissertation. Her support and help with obtaining bibliographical sources from all around the world in record time was invaluable and helped to nourish my research. I would also like to express my thanks to Dr. Patrick Zabalbeascoa at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona for his comments. ii His work on the analysis of humor in translation was a valuable tool in my research, and I was fortunate to be able to directly benefit from his suggestions. I would like to thank the participants at conferences in the United States, France, Ireland, the United Kingdom, Spain and Norway, where I presented some of this research while it was in progress, including the following scholars in the fields of humor and translation studies: Salvatore Attardo, Andrew Chesterman, Kurt Feyaerts, Theo Hermans, Coco Norén, Neal R. Norrick, Maeve Olohan, Anthony Pym, Leonor Ruiz Gurillo, Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez, and Lawrence Venuti. Their questions and comments were helpful as I worked through this dissertation with the objective of reaching plausible conclusions. I would also like to thank the following institutions, whose excellent collections of materials and dedicated staff facilitated my research: Bucknell University, the University of Pennsylvania, Trinity School, the New York Public Library, the British Library, the Bodleian Library and the Taylor Institution Library at the University of Oxford. I am grateful to my family in Spain for supporting me in every step of this process, especially to my parents for teaching me how important it is to have a sense of humor and, to use the famous Monty Python phrase, “to always look on the bright side of life.” Also, I would like to thank Marianne David, my research colleague, mentor, and family in New York City, whose help has been invaluable in transforming this study into a doctoral dissertation. I was fortunate to be able to draw on her knowledge, advice and expertise, which served as a tremendously rich source of inspiration for my work. Last but not least, I would like to thank Pawel Adrjan, who has had utmost faith in this project from the very beginning. As a speaker of many languages and a talented researcher, he has contributed by encouraging me with every aspect of this study, by helping me collect jokes from informants in the most unimaginable places, and by translating fragments of rare books and vintage articles that had not previously been used. I am also grateful for our numerous stimulating discussions, which served to add new perspectives to iii this research and will undoubtedly enable it to evolve in the future. I could not thank him enough for supporting me in moving from continent to continent and from university to university, and for helping me stay on track with this dissertation while combining research and teaching. Finally, I hope that the readers of this dissertation enjoy it as much as I did while working on this topic, and that they experience the same fascination for the role played by sound in the configuration of humor that I developed over the years. I hope they discover, as I did while collecting all the humorous examples contained in this study, how interconnected we are as a planet despite the many different languages we speak, and how, in spite of the cultural differences across the globe, our perception and representation of humor has so many features in common. iv Abstract This dissertation examines the relationship between sound, meaning, humor and culture through the lens of translation. It illustrates the relevance of sound to determining the meaning of words by analyzing textual examples in a variety of media—oral, written and visual—where the phonological aspect of words constitutes a deliberate component of the message. Sound is also presented as a cultural and linguistic factor present in the configuration of certain types of humor. Phonological jokes, or jokes that use words of one’s own language to parody the way another language sounds, are selected out of a variety of possible texts as heuristic tools for analyzing the interrelationship between sound and meaning within a humorous context. A primary classification of this type of joke is presented together with an original corpus of examples from over 30 languages. Such multilingual perspective enables us to examine the role of sound as a culturally-bound component of language, while demonstrating that sound-based humor exists in multiple cultures and is a widespread phenomenon. Resum Aquesta tesi analitza la relació entre el so, el significat, l'humor i la cultura a través de la traducció. Il·lustra la importància del so per determinar el significat de les paraules mitjançant l'anàlisi d'exemples textuals en una varietat de mitjans de comunicació—oral, escrit i visual—destacant com l'aspecte fonològic de les paraules constitueix un component intencional del missatge. El so es presenta a més com un factor cultural i lingüístic present en la configuració de certs tipus d'humor. Per demostrar aquest aspecte, d’una varietat de possibles textos humorístics s’han seleccionat acudits de caràcter fonològic, o acudits que es fan servir paraules de la llengua pròpia amb el propòsit de parodiar la manera com sona un altre idioma. Aquests acudits serveixen com a eines heurístiques per a l'anàlisi de la interrelació entre el so i el significat en un context humorístic. Una classificació primària d'aquest tipus d’acudits es presenta juntament amb un corpus original i multilingüe d’exemples en més de 30 idiomes. Aquesta perspectiva d’anàlisi multilingüe ens permet examinar el paper del so com un component cultural arrelat en la llengua, alhora que demostra que l'humor basat en el so existeix en diverses cultures i és un fenomen generalitzat. v Table of Contents Acknowledgements i Abstract v Table of Contents vii Introduction 1 Origins of the Research 3 Objectives and Hypotheses 6 Methodology 8 Structure of the Dissertation 11 Chapter 1.