ABSTRACT
Anyone who has ever tried to tell a joke in a language other than his or her own will know how easy it is for it to get lost in translation simply because what often seems so amusing in one language may just not be funny in another. The reason for this, of course, lies in the fact that verbal humor, among other things, depends on incongruities that are present in both the language in which it is couched and on a series of cultural features that are often specific to the source culture alone. If the joke plays on the ambiguity of a word or phrase with two or more meanings and you have the good fortune to find that the same word or phrase in the target language has exactly the same meanings as in the source language, your luck is in and your task is almost accomplished. However, in the unlikely event that the words themselves do translate in exactly the same way, the culture-specificity of the joke may well remain an insurmountable challenge. Owing to the fact that good jokes play on the combination of linguistic specificity and highly specific cultural references, recipients need to be knowledgeable enough regarding events, history, people, customs, and values of the source culture to be able to know what you are talking about and recognize your attempt at non-seriousness. If you do manage to overcome all these problems with an adequate translation, whether your interlocutor will find it funny or not is yet another problem. Whichever way we look at it, verbal humor does not travel well.
