“The received wisdom that you can never translate a joke is worth examining a bit more closely,” Bellos told me. The trick to translating humor, Bellos argues in his book, “Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything,” is to abandon the idea of perfect fidelity and instead try to find a joke that rings some of the same bells as the original. By this standard, many simple punch lines, from the morbid to the absurd, are not that much harder to translate than the weather.
When complications do arise, they are usually caused by one of two tricky areas: cultural references and wordplay, according to those seasoned in the art. Culture-bound humor often presents a dilemma: you can either lose readers with a cryptic allusion or you can burden the text with explanatory footnotes. In an increasingly English-speaking world, the best solution is sometimes to let it stand.
As with serious prose, it’s no coincidence that the best translators are among the most enthusiastic readers. “I feel that when the translator is laughing, the humor will manage to get across,” the Greek translator Myrsini Gana said […]
No matter how resourceful the translator, though, there are limits to what can be faithfully done to elicit a laugh. “You try to save as much as possible without driving yourself crazy,” said Ingo Herzke, who has rendered Shteyngart into German. But, he admitted, “More often than not you have to let a joke go.”