Translating jokes

We all know that the best way to kill a joke is to translate it, and yet how else do you share a joke when it is not purely visual?

Watch Dave and Si as they try to make sense of this naughty joke. In the end the French producer has to come to the rescue.

Video transcript

Jean Claude Rodriguez: La cuisse.    Simon: The skin.    JCR: Ici, la cuisse. Et au milieu, la saucisse.    Simon: La saucisse, oui.     JCR: La saucisse se glisse entre les cuisses.    Simon: La saucisse, la cuisse?    JCR: Traduction, s’il vous plaît. Il comprend pas!     Producer: OK, you got the leg of that, you got the leg - you got the leg with the sausages in between. And because they´re moist, the sausages always slide. [All laugh]    Dave: Do you want me to translate that?     JCR: C’est compris?     Simon: Oui, c’est compris, oui.    Producer: Alors maintenant qu’il a capté on le refait une fois et lui il va le dire en anglais.

Life without an interpreter

In the absence of interpreters, people just have to manage as best they can. BBC producer Dan Slee recalls his own experience in Hungary.

Video transcript

Dan Slee We had an interesting border crossing going into Romania, which was all sorted out and wasn’t a problem, but certainly in terms of us getting our vehicles over and making sure all our paperwork’s ticked off and sorted that got quite interesting, because our Hungarian fixer didn’t speak Romanian and our Romanian fixer wasn’t there yet and we were out the for the recce, so that got quite good fun, we had quite a lot of fun there. But again lots of gesticulating and waving bits of paper in front of people’s faces from both sides tends to do the trick.

The missing word

Even with the best will in the world, communication does sometimes break down. The Spanish young man who is helping in this shoot is not a professional interpreter, so he struggles to translate a traditional saying whereby 'bread and babies will feel the cold even in August'.

Watch Simon’s efforts to make sense of the translation, and the way he uses physical contact (an arm around the interpreter’s shoulders) to make up for the communication breakdown.

Video transcript

Baker: Lo tapamos.    Dave: ¿Sí?    Baker: Para que no enfríe deprisa. Para que el calor termine de hacer la miga por dentro. El pan lo tenemos que tener en fermentación tapado y a… cuando sale de cocer.   Dave & Simon: Sí.    Baker: Porque en Asturias hay un dicho -     Simon: Asturias, tradition in Asturias!     Baker: - en Asturias, que dice 'El pan y el niño en agosto tiene frío'.    Simon: Bravo, Maríasu, bravo! [Producer asks interpreter to translate]    Interpreter: Eh - the bread must be keep eh - to keep the humidity.    Simon: Yeah.    Interpreter: And - she told also that here in Asturias it is said that in August, because of this, the humidity and -    Simon: Yes.    Interpreter: In August, childs and bread must be keep.    Simon: Ah, OK.    Interpreter: Children -     Simon: Children and bread must be kept. Ah - OK. So they don’t go off soon?    Interpreter: What?     Simon: I don’t know, just a suggestion! [laughs]    Dave: That smells great. Hey, back to the job!

Interpreters can get it wrong

Even the best professional interpreters occasionally make errors. BBC producer Richard Sharman recalls a rather conspicuous example during the preparatory work for the Germany programme.

Video transcript

Richard Sharman We had interpreters, so we were reliant on those for the research, because without those people on location talking fluently, getting across the detail, the meaning, the content that we were looking for, and also I suppose the intent and the tone of the programme and I think both our interpreters both in Italy and Austria were fantastic. Their language was brilliant and I trusted them pretty well implicitly. So we did have that, and without that we couldn’t have done it or certainly not in the timeframe that we had, so they were crucial.

Also but even they were not necessarily impregnable, because there was one case in Austria there was a confusion over the idea of the word 'baked' funnily enough it being a bakeation and in German apparently 'baked' or to 'bake' is the same as 'fry' or 'to deep fry', and there was a confusion about this and someone would have to tell me if they speak German, I don’t know this, but there was certainly a misunderstanding to the point where we went on the recce on a trip to a potential contributor who run a restaurant and he had innovated a dish called baked fish of some sort, some sort of baked fish, and we arrived, we started filming him doing his thing and he was deep frying it. So I was saying to our interpreter where’s the baking in this? And that’s when we realised or he realised, we collectively realised there was a huge confusion over the word baked.

Using the language gap

Sometimes speakers actually use the language gap itself to strengthen their own identity. A common strategy is to make private jokes that are only intended for those who speak one’s own language.

In this example the programme editor uses subtitles to create a complicity between the BBC team and their English-speaking viewers. This kind of strategy raises ethical issues because speakers themselves may not realise that a joke is being made.

Video transcript

Richard Sharman: This particular contributor spoke no English, he spoke Italian very, very fast, as his colleague kind of pointed out, so it just seemed to ram home that it sounded utterly impossible for anybody to understand. It’s that kind of thing where you’d think as a native English speaker that this is the language that nobody could ever understand, so it just seemed like an impregnable wall. I think that was spotted by the editor I was working with to give him credit. He said why don’t we have some fun with this because, you know, it just sounds so mad that this could actually be intelligible to anybody. So we just innovated this idea that we would give subtitles, but they would not necessarily be trustworthy ones, and we felt we were allowed to do that, because it was the bikers and we could have a bit of fun.

Voiceover: Fred’s mate Chicco is one of the chefs here. He’s a local lad and has agreed to show us how to make his family’s version of Ferrara’s pasta pie.

Federico Pellegrini: Hey! Hello Chicco.    Simon: Hi Chicco. Hi. Ciao.    Federico: Oh, fantastic.    Simon: So is this the pastry, Chicco?    Federico: Questa è la pasta frolla.    Chicco: Sì, sì.    Federico: Chicco don’t speak English but speak Italian very very quickly. Yeah?    Simon: That’ll be it, yeah.    David: Yeah (laughter).    Voiceover: Hold on a minute. Italian? Very fast? We’re going to struggle with that. Ah but luckily our director speaks Italian and he’s offered to put subtitles on to explain what Chicco is saying. That’s fab, isn’t it dude?    Chicco: Bisogna spiegargli che la dobbiamo fare riposare attentamente.    Federico: Put it in the fridge. 20 minutes.    Voiceover: Hang on. I smell a rat. I think the director is having a bit of a laugh at our expense.    Chicco: Quando diventa liquido ma ancora prima che bolla, come dire che frigga, cominciamo ad aggiungere la farina.    Simon: Ah?    Chicco: La tostiamo nel burro, farina e burro tostati insieme.    Simon: So flour and butter.    David: So flour and butter. Cooked together.    Chicco: Piano piano del latte.    David: Just milk?    Federico: Milk.    Chicco: Yes.   Federico: But warm it. David: Warm milk. Yeah.    Federico: Warm the milk. Yes warm the milk.   Simon: Yes.    Voicover: Right. Seeing as these subtitles don’t seem to be reliable, we’d better tell you what’s going on. Chicco is making a béchamel sauce, and he starts by adding flour to melted butter. But he seems in no hurry.    Federico: Helping Chicco. The king of the béchamel sauce. You fall in love many many many women with this recipe.     Simon: There you go. Lads, teenagers, anybody that’s on the pull.    David: Yeah.    Simon: Learn how to cook, you’re laughing.    David: See. There’s passion in a pan.    Chicco: Questo l’ho capito anch’io.

Voiceover: Right that’s it. Enough with the subtitles. Chicco’s now using the world’s tiniest grater to add nutmeg to his sauce.

Richard: I was concerned slightly that we were going to misrepresent him, so I made sure to clear it with him and to talk about it with his colleague and show them a little cut of the piece, but they were very happy. So really it was for fun, it was just to make a comic effect in the programme.