How do puns said in Japanese still make sense in English?

7 comments

1. There are a few puns, idioms and other forms of ことば遊び　(kotoba asobi) that can translate directly.

   A fair few more that are similar descriptions of the same phenomenon.

   However, a vast majority of those you will see in subtitles, knives out and community (series) both have good examples of kanji based puns, are the remarkable and ingenious work of translators and transcribers that shiuld be appreciated more.

2. They don’t. Translators just make up an equivalent pun in English.

3. Translation isn’t about directly writing the English meaning of each word in a Japanese sentence. It’s about conveying the same feeling of what’s being said into English.

4. If you could please give the Japanese versions too, it would go a long way to explaining what you mean.

5. What they’re saying in Japanese usually doesn’t sound anything like the original english…. But that can be said for a lot of language, not just puns.

6. How is “Truckers line houses with long hallways” a pun?

   Word play in general just doesn’t translate. As others have indicated, sometimes the translator just inserts something to fill in the space with something that’s at least a little humorous.

   There’s a famous story of a Japanese translator doing live translation for an American giving a speech to a Japanese audience. When the speaker made a pun the translator just told the audience, “He has said said a joke. Please laugh politely”….which the audience then did.

   I’ve always pitied the poor translator who had to do the movie *Airplane*, which was had monstrous amounts of word play in it which was just absolutely impossible to translate in context.

7. That’s why translating is hard. Because as simple as a simple word can be hard. Translators just give the equivalent meaning in English