Cultural references and humour are great problems for any translator. What is regarded as basic general knowledge in one culture may be unknown or even seem bizarre in a different one, while humour is often literally untranslatable if it involves a play on words. For example, I once translated advertising material that used a cat as the icon of the campaign for something that was free. The slogan was gatuito, playing on Spanish gato (cat) and gratuito (free). All I could do was leave the word as it was, thus losing an element of humour.
So it was with great pleasure that I found an example of a translator actually improving on an original. In the TV series The Office a character is describing a tasteless club in Slough that has a Tudor theme and says ‘They’ve got an Anne Boleyn bowling gallery.’ (The particular tastelessness lies in the naming of a bowling gallery for a woman who was beheaded.) This was subtitled in Spanish as ‘Tienen una Ana Bolera.’ The point is that Anne Boleyn is known, and not liked, in Spain as the woman who caused Henry VIII to divorce Catherine of Aragon, who was the King of Spain’s daughter. Names of royalty are always translated in Spanish (even now the British royal family has Isabel and Felipe with their son Carlos, and grandchildren Guillermo (married to Catalina) and Enrique) and Anne Boleyn is known as Ana Bolena. It happens that the Spanish for a bowling gallery is bolera so by combining the two, Ana Bolera provides a humorous play on words that is, to my mind, better than the mere sarcasm of the original.
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| Bolena | Bolera |
(Images, Wikipedia)
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