This just came from Baker Academic:
Wow, what a surprise! Who would have imagined it? I'm pinching myself. I've never had one of my books translated into Arabic before, and certainly not one of my Greek textbooks. How in the world do you translate puns like these into a foreign language?
- Up the Greek without a Paddle
- There's No Place like Rome
- Rho, Rho, Rho Your Boat
- Woe Is I
- Tense Times with Verbs
- To Koine Phrase
And then there's the title itself:
I suppose such jokes are simply lost in translation. I've read that sometimes the translator will change a few words so that the pun will work in the target language. This is one of those things that makes translating so exciting and challenging. Not only do you need to know both languages. You need to be a wordsmith in the target language.
I suppose the first question to ask is: "Is the humor essential to the meaning of the passage?" For the puns I've listed above, the answer is clearly no. So I imagine that the translators will simply gloss over them and convey the meaning in a straightforward fashion. Or maybe they can find a completely different pun that can still be humorous in Arabic. Of course, what's funny in one culture may not be funny in another. I suppose this is one reason we can't understand horses. Their translation is well *neigh* impossible.
You: "Ok, Dave, you need to reign in those puns of yours."
Me: "Hold your horses! They're good puns!"
You: "But I'm sick of your unbridled jokes!"
Me: "Ok, I'll stop horsing around."
By the way, my favorite pun in German is: "No matter how kind you are, German children are Kinder."
Have a wonderful week!