Translating idioms and jokes — how do good translators handle it?

@margins_mike OP

1mo ago

My book leans hard on wordplay, a couple of running puns, and very culturally specific humor. I'm genuinely worried it's untranslatable and that a translator will either flatten the jokes or drown them in footnotes. For those who've been translated or who translate, how do the good ones actually handle this?

11 comments

@kovac_ink1mo ago

The word you want is transcreation. A good translator doesn't translate the joke, they recreate its EFFECT. If a pun depends on two English words sounding alike, I throw out those specific words and build a new pun in my language that lands in the same spot and does the same emotional work. Fidelity to a joke means fidelity to the laugh, not to the literal syllables.

@margins_mikeOP1mo ago

That idea of fidelity to the laugh reframes the whole thing for me. So I should expect the actual words of my best joke to change completely, and that's the work going right rather than going wrong.

@kovac_ink1mo ago

Exactly. If you cling to the literal words, you lose the function, and the function is what your reader actually experiences. The sign of a translator who gets it is that they'll ask you what a joke is DOING in the scene, not just what it means.

@the_red_pen1mo ago

Give the translator explicit latitude in writing, and ideally annotate your own text. I send a short note for each pun or running gag explaining what it's doing, what has to survive, and what's expendable. That single document turns an impossible guessing game into a creative brief, and it's the highest-leverage thing an author can do.

@manuscript_mona1mo ago

That annotated brief saved one of my running gags. I marked which one of my recurring jokes was load-bearing for the ending, so the translator knew to invent a target-language version that could pay off forty chapters later. Without that note she'd have localized each instance separately and the finale would have collapsed.

@nocturne_writes1mo ago

Footnotes are the last resort, not the tool. A footnote on a joke is a confession that the humor died on the operating table, because nobody laughs at an explained joke. They're sometimes defensible for a culturally specific reference with real plot weight, but for comedy itself a footnote is basically a tombstone.

@comma_kira1mo ago

There's a known scale for cultural references, roughly: keep it as-is, keep it with a tiny gloss woven into the text, swap in a target-culture equivalent, generalize it, or drop it and compensate with something nearby. A skilled translator moves up and down that ladder rung by rung depending on how much weight each reference carries. Footnotes sit off the ladder entirely.

@margins_mikeOP1mo ago

I'm walking away with a real plan: write the annotated joke brief, mark which gags are load-bearing for the plot, grant transcreation latitude in the contract, and treat footnotes as a failure state. This thread did exactly what I hoped.

@pulp_priya1mo ago

Compensation is the elegant trick people miss. If a joke is genuinely unsavable in one spot, a good translator plants an extra bit of wit a paragraph later to keep the overall comic density the same. The reader never knows a trade happened, they just feel the book is as funny as you intended across the whole chapter.

@dorian_w1mo ago

Names and signs are their own battle. I had a character whose name was a pun, and my translator and I went back and forth for a week before inventing a new name in the target language that carried the same double meaning. Worth every email. A literally-transliterated name would have made the running joke invisible.

@foggy_chapters1mo ago

Build in time for it, too. Transcreating humor is slow, iterative work with a lot of back-and-forth, so don't hand a comedy-heavy novel to someone on a brutal deadline. The jokes are precisely the part that suffers first when the clock is tight.