For better or for worse-the challenges of translating English humour into Arabic

Abstract EN

The language of humour is highly motivated and relies heavily on deliberately devised structural complexity and semantic ambiguity.

Translators must know the target and source language and culture extremely well.

The translator being the mediator is required to create approximately a similar impact and response to that of the original environment through transcending the difficulties inherent not only in the grammatical, semantic, pragmatic, and cultural features of the original text, but also in the aesthetic and stylistic features represented in a skillfully manipulated ambiguities, puns, rhyming sounds, morphemes, words and context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate and analyze some aspects of English humour and demonstrate the difficulties encountered in rendering it into Arabic, a language linguistically and culturally different from English.