A Comparative Study in Relation to the Translation of the Linguistic Humor

Mark Twain made use of repetition and parallelism as two comedic literary devices to bring comic effect to the readers. Linguistic devices of humor, repetition and parallelism seemed to create many difficulties in the translation of literary texts. The present study applied Delabatista‟s strategies for translating wordplays such as repetition and parallelism in the translation of humorous texts from English into Persian. Material used in this study included the novel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” written by Mark Twain and its two translations by Najaf Daryabandari and Hushang Pirnazar. According to the categorization of wordplays by Delabastita, repetitions and parallelism in this humorous novel were extracted and analyzed with their two translations according to Delabastita‟s strategies of translating pun. The results of this research study showed that the two translators used different strategies in translation of the humor. Daryabandari could transfer repetition and parallelism to the target text; however, Pirnazar was not successful in its transference and could not recreate humor in the target text.