Interlingual puns

Some people seem to think (see this post) that a really great machine-translation program would be able to “handle complicated multilingual puns with ease.” But what is a “multilingual pun” anyway?

The prefix “multi” implies more than two, and honestly, off the top of my head I can’t think of any puns involving more than two languages. If you have one, please send it in!

But I know of some puns between two languages – I think these are properly called “interlingual puns.”

For example, here’s an old joke my Dad used to enjoy telling: “What did the alien say in the music store?” – “Take me to your Lieder.”

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ….sigh.

Consider whether an AI machine translator could handle this pun with ease – by “handle” I assume the author meant “translate.” Could the best ever future MT translate this joke into Japanese, or Thai, or French, or Navajo, or Spanish? Um, no? Neither could a human translator. It’s just not possible. If it appeared in a story you were translating, you’d insert a similar joke, but you couldn’t reproduce this exact joke. Some things really are not translatable.

The joke works by combining English and German, so could you translate it into German? Again, no. It wouldn’t work in reverse, so to speak. German speakers with good English and a good knowledge of 20th century pop culture would be able to get it, though.

OK, let’s try another one. I saw this pun being assembled in real time on social media. A friend of mine who was getting a PhD in Arab Studies posted:

ABD

which his academic pals recognized as the acronym for “all but dissertation,” i.e. he had reached an important phase in his course of study. Congratulations were offered in the comments section, but someone also left this comment:

abd al-dissertation

which is a pretty funny pun because it sounds like an Arabic name meaning “servant of the dissertation,” and that of course is what he was going to be for the next year or so. (For more context on the Arabic name in question, go here.)

Is this translatable into any other language? Nope. And there’s nothing humans or MT can do about it. Part of the romance of translation is the bittersweet knowledge that some things just can’t be carried over into another language, like rare flowers that won’t grow outside their native land.