Incongruity-specific British and American Humour from the Perspective of Translation Studies

Abstract

The aim of this study is to reveal the interrelation between the national character of the comic, its cognitive mechanisms and the choice of the strategy while representing the comic in Ukrainian translations of J. K. Jerome’s and O. Henry’s flash fiction. First, using the methodological principles of Linguoculturology, we determine how sociocultural context influenced the British and American authors’ consciousness which determined the cultural aspect of their individual worldview and the specifics of their sense of humour. Then we identified the comically marked contexts in J. K. Jerome’s and O. Henry’s flash fiction using the methodology of linguopoetic research, and revealed the features of incongruity as the cognitive mechanisms of the comic in their works applying the methods of cognitive linguistics. At the final stage, we performed the translation analysis of the distinguished comically marked contexts evaluating the strategies used for representing the comic in Ukrainian translation.

The analysis of the research material elucidates the following conclusions. The cultural background of the British or American writer determines the specifics of incongruity (logical, notional, valorative and ontological) as the cognitive mechanisms of the comic embodied in their flash fiction which, in its turn, strongly influences the choice of the translation strategy. The comic in J. K. Jerome’s fiction is represented in Ukrainian translations mostly by using the strategies of preservation and localization, while O. Henry’s humour is rendered by using localization and addition. Hence, the strategies of representing the comic in Ukrainian translation highly depend on the comic pictures of the world of the author and the target reader.