I just wanted to add a tiny detail, go a step further than Zervantes did when he wrote about jokes being difficult to translate. The thing is, the translation is not always worth the effort – with all the forces of the Universe by your side you might just not be able to make it anywhere near as good as the original. Therefore sometimes you don’t. You skip the ‘fun’ of this particular quote and make up for it somewhere else (if possible, ofcourse – I can’t imagine not translating a joke in a laugh track featured movie/tv show).

That’s what they taught me in my translation classes and – to some extednd- I concur with the thought (though it’s easier to do in translating books than witty tv shows).

So if the guy (sorry, I won’t scroll up the page to find the guy’s nick cause I’m saving up strength for my evening’s Kanji repetition) can’t find anything funny in the translation there is a slight chance that the joke simply isn’t there.

Dude (Kazu), your writing is addictive, I have to timebox reading it… 

しかしpuns take work. homophones don’t transalteから (or rarely, if ever)

Even more so, since I’ve been using the site in my studies as well. Oh well. Maybe I’m getting Alzheimer’s :O

As for the dub I’m using, it’s the Spanish dub from the US DVDs, which I believe is the Latin American dub, but I’m not 100% on that. (I am interested in Latin American Spanish, particularly Mexico.) Zervantes and Marco, thanks for the information about the dubs. And Marco, thanks for the suggestions on native Spanish humor – I’m definitely going to check those out and would welcome any other recommendations from anyone else. Your suggestion (and Victoria’s) to check out some humor created in the culture was a good one.

For the record, I’m trying to watch the Simpsons in Spanish because I cannot resist watching the reruns on TV, and that adds up to a lot of time not doing Spanish. I figured instead of fighting the urge, I should harness it.

Thanks again, all!

When you have reached the level in which you can use a monolingual dictionary, I believe monolingual dictionaries are always better than bilingual ones. Even in the situation you describe, I think a monodict is superior. By reading the description in the target language, you can see how the target language describes animals (or whatever object you are looking up). This keeps your mind within the target language and allows you to be exposed to a whole host of language that you would be kept from if you just referred to the bilingual dictionary.
I exclusively use a Chinese monodict, and the sense of accomplishment I feel (“a win” if you will) when I figure out what animal is being referenced is great. If I can understand “swan”, for example, from just a small description then that means my Chinese is really on its way. If I still can’t figure it out, I just enter the word into Google or Baidu images, and see what shows up. It’s better to connect the word to a real-world referent rather than to your native language concept.

Or you could look the animals etc up in Google images, understand what they are and then use the mono-definition as a back up. (and maybe learn some related words in the process)

Or a children’s picture dictionary would work.

My Japanese is good enough to use kokugo dictionaries, and I certainly do use them. But I’ll never give up my Kenkyuusha J-E dictionary. It’s very useful. And though I don’t use them anymore, I benefited a lot from reading English translations in parallel with Japanese books when I was learning to read. Sometimes there’s just no other way to follow things at all, if what you’re reading is way over your head. But reading stuff that’s way over your head can be very beneficial. Of course once you can follow things pretty well you should give up the translation. I’ve been wanting to learn to read classical Japanese, and I think for that I’ll try reading Genji in parallel with a modern Japanese edition.

They do have an important advantage over monolingual dictionaries though, and that’s for finding out the words for animals, flowers and other species of living things. Whereas in a monolingual dictionary one would get a whole paragraph describing what the particular thing looks like, its behaviour, its diet and so on, with a bilingual dictionary I could just get the immediate, one-to-one translation of its name in English.

From the How-to-learn-any-language-forum:

“Well, the more I think about them, the more I think that monolingual dictionaries are not very useful to the foreign language student. They look cool, but at the end of the day it is much, much faster to get a translation of a word than having to go from word to definition and then trying to figure out what it is. For instance I tried using my Italian monolingual dictionary to decipher some unknown words I had found, but what can you do with for example Martora: Small carnivorous mammifer of the Martora family, with a long body with a long tail, small head, pointed nose and highly prized fur that lives in woods of Northern Europe and Asia.? Of course you might eventually guess correctly what it is but it’s much quicker and more accurate to match directly the foreign word to the concept of a marten that you already have in your brain by way of a direct translation.”

bit.ly/x49m5

I’m not familiar with the Spain dub of the Simpsons, but I can tell you that the Latin American version is pretty hit or miss. For the most part the translators follow the original dialogue very closely but they often come up with new jokes, especially when they feel the original references to events or personalities are too esoteric for Latin American audiences. The translators can’t always match the wit of the original scripts, of course, but they sometimes manage to write jokes that, in my opinion at least, are better than the English version. All too often, however, they drop the ball and fail to adequately convey what was said by the characters.

Maybe you’ll get a more accurate idea of what is funny in Spanish by focusing on native comedians rather than translations. Humor being subjective and all, it’s going to be a lot harder to find material that fits your current level of Spanish and that amuses you at the same time. Try the following:

– La Tremenda Corte, a Cuban radio show from the 50s that is still popular throughout Latin America.
– Tin Tan, widely regarded as Mexico’s best comedian, recommended films (mostly from the 1940s): El rey del barrio, Calabacitas tiernas, El revoltoso, La marca del zorrillo, El ceniciento.
– Polo Polo, also from Mexico, known for his lewd jokes.

The Tin Tan movies can be easily found on DVD for cheap. The Polo Polo and La Tremenda Corte recordings are available on mp3 on several websites and message boards.

To be honest this is a great summary. Also, from my own experience as a non-native speaker of Japanese I would suggest that you’re going at this very analytically (someone else has already suggested that direct word-for-word translation doesn’t work for humour *or anything*, and he’s right) and that it is also a mistake trying to understand American humour translated into Spanish and then re-translated back into English in your mind. Culturally, different things will be amusing in Spanish. This links into the word-for-word translation point, too – translation at any level fails if it focuses on lexical or grammatical equivalence. “These words = those words” often fails. Tenses also cannot always be directly mapped – in Japanese the て　います form can be likened to English present continuous, but it also has a whole world of other meaning just sat there waiting to bite you on the ar$e in the middle of an otherwise cracking punchline.

To understand Spanish humour I would recommend getting hold of some supposedly funny material from your target *culture*, and watching it. When you’ve done this for about fifty hours, you will begin to get a sense of what is funny. You will find yourself chuckling inexplicably when people say something incomprehensible that other people respond to with laughter and unfathomable exclaimations. You will start to get a *feel* for the meaning of little everyday phrases that aren’t in your textbook but are absolutely essential to functioning in everyday conversation.

Give it a go, and let us know how you get on!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-3Lz03r2NLY&feature=related

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xjQgSt6F9-8&feature=related

www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGoRo-nPLOM&feature=PlayList&p=922811EF12C13FFE&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=1

www.youtube.com/watch?v=92uof5os5hs

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gy9N9JD-sU

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BiLKq9cQQMs