Können übersetzte Witze auch witzig sein? Einige Überlegungen zu (Schwierigkeiten bei) der mündlichen Übersetzung von Witzen

The subject of this article is a reflection on the potential difficulties with interpreting humorous texts, especially jokes. The basic assumption of many theories of humour is the belief that a surprise is a necessary element of humour. Many verbal jokes are based on the so-called “surprise effect” (cf. Hurley et al. 2011: 53) – the occurrence of an unexpected, surprising element in the punch line of a joke. We assume that it is a significant factor that decides that humour is a difficult challenge for the interpreter. The article presents the results of a study involving the 2nd year master’s students of applied linguistics at the University of Warsaw. In this study, we analysed both the original texts (verbal jokes) in German and English, as well as their oral translations into Polish, and the results of this comparative analysis were confronted with the reflections of the authors of translations, who self-evaluated the difficulties of the original text and the translation solutions used by them. In this study, we also compared the assessment of how funny the jokes were in their original language and translated into another language.