Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2023

Translation and contrastive analysis of collocational verbal humour in English-French TED Talks transcripts bidirectional corpora: findings

Résumé

Verbal humour is a complex issue involving different types of mechanisms, of which linguistic incongruity, based on clashes in collocational behaviour, is one. These include prosodic clashes (Louw, 1993), semantic clashes (Sun, 2020; i.e. clashes in semantic preference), relexicalization (Sinclair's idiom principle overridden by the open-choice principle), and others. While cross-linguistic studies on semantic prosody and semantic preference are quite numerous (Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, 1996; Partington, 1998; Berber Sardinha, 2000; Xiao and McEnery, 2006; Kübler and Volanschi, 2012; Ebeling, 2014; Wu and Li, 2016; Jurko, 2021; Grabowski, 2022; Yang and Zeng, 2021), the literature on prosodic clashes with humorous or ironic effects is scarce (Louw, 1993; Partington, 2011; Sun, 2020), although the translation of verbal humour has also become a subject of study (Vandaele, 2010; Szeflińska-Baran and Baran, 2019). This paper explores these three topics by investigating the translation of linguistic incongruities that elicit laughter. Semantic prosody has been defined by Louw (1993, p. 30) as “a consistent aura of meaning with which a form is imbued by its collocates”. It is a statistical tendency for a word or sequence of words to co-occur with positively or negatively connotated words. When an unexpectedly connotated constituent co-occurs with the word or sequence of words with established semantic prosody, a prosodic clash (semantic prosody clash) occurs, producing an ironic or humorous effect. Semantic preference 'is defined by a lexical set of frequently occurring collocates that share some semantic feature' (Stubbs, 2001, p. 449). Similar to prosodic clash, co-occurrence with a word that does not share the presumed semantic feature, i.e. semantic clash, can elicit laughter. The aim of this study is to present a corpus-based translation and contrastive analysis of the linguistic incongruities based on clashes in collocational behaviour in TED Talks within the framework of British contextualism. Our data were collected in a comparable bidirectional English-French corpus of TED Talks transcripts, divided into 4 subcorpora: English originals (4.4 million tokens), French translations (5.5 million tokens), French originals (2 million tokens) and English translations (650 000 tokens, incomplete due to missing translations). Our research questions are 1.How good are the respective English and French translations of humorous prosodic clashes and related linguistic incongruities in TED Talks? 2.Are there differences in verbal humour strategies between the English and French originals? 3.Are there differences in linguistic humour strategies between English and French original and translated texts? Initially, semantic prosody was the focus of this research. Louw (1993), Hunston (2001), Partington (2004), McEnery, Xiao and Tono (2006) noted the difficulty of finding semantic prosody in a corpus, and Berber Sardinha (2000) and Louw (2000) observed the need for an automatic detection tool. For them, it was still necessary to rely on linguistic intuition about a word or a sequence of words with semantic prosody and then to validate its presence by studying its collocates in a corpus, general or specialised, depending on the discourse. Previously, we developed a semi-automated method to detect semantic prosody in our corpus, by looking for prosodic clashes that elicit the laughter of the audience. This method involves pre-tagging and pre-annotation using the morpho-syntactic tagger CLAWS and Wmatrix's USAS (Archer, Wilson, and Rayson, 2002) tool for semantic annotation, and then uploading the tagged corpus into SketchEngine (Kilgarriff et al., 2014). A CQL search in SketchEngine, combining the USAS emotion labels - considered as carriers of positive or negative connotations - with the audience laughter marker present in the TED Talks transcripts, allowed us to identify sequences with potential prosodic clashes. Qualitative analysis of the resulting concordances helped us to distinguish contexts in which humorous effect is generated by prosodic clashes in the TED Talks corpus. However, at this stage, further examination of these concordances revealed a concentration of a number of mechanisms of verbal humour within the same instances: connotative clashes, semantic preference clashes, relexicalizations, oxymorons, register humour, domain conflict and some others. We have therefore decided to broaden the scope of our research from exclusively humorous prosodic clashes to the above-mentioned humorous linguistic incongruities and to establish a tentative typology of these phenomena. We will also show how general corpora, such as the TenTen family (Jakubíček et al., 2013), have been used to validate and understand such mechanisms of verbal humour. Preliminary results show that translations are mostly successful in both directions: quite often the collocational tendencies of the translation equivalents are comparable (for 12 out of 21 English examples with prosodic clashes, the French equivalents have the same semantic prosodies) and mostly successful (16 out of 21). However, the existing cross-linguistic differences are a source of translation difficulties. For example, in the following example, the bound collocation to wage war is broken by replacing war with its antonym peace, creating the "effect of novelty" (Partington, 2006, p. 124). This effect cannot be fully reproduced in French because no verb collocates with guerre ('war') or other types of violent conflict as exclusively as the English wage. (1)Now you go back to raising kids and waging peace and craving candy (Rives, 2006). (2)En attendant, retourne élever tes enfants, répands la paix, et mange des bonbons (official TED translation). The results of the English-French translation analysis show that semantic prosody can differ in strength between languages - e.g. inspiration in English has a stronger positive semantic prosody than inspiration in French. The former has more positive collocates (e.g. creativity, hope, wisdom, joy, passion from the WordSketch for inspiration in the EnTenTen21 corpus) than the latter, with mostly neutral collocates (créativité, envie, aspiration, style from the WordSketch for inspiration in the FrTenTen20 corpus), rendering the prosodic clash in French silent. However, optimisme tends to collocate with more positive words (espoir, confiance, positivité, gaieté, joie from the WordSketch for optimisme in the FrTenTen20 corpus) and can be used as a synonym for inspiration in the context of the example. (3)The sense in which I can be uplifting and inspiring – I mean, there's always been a kind of a certain grim dimension to the way I try to uplift, so if grim inspiration – (Laughter) – if grim inspiration is not a contradiction in terms, that is, I'm afraid, the most you can hope for (Wright, 2006). (4)Ma façon d'être optimiste et enthousiaste – je veux dire, il y a toujours eu un côté sombre dans ma manière d’être optimiste, donc si l'optimisme sombre – (Rires) donc, si l’optimisme sombre n’est pas une contradiction en soi, j'ai bien peur, que ce soit ce que vous pouvez espérer de mieux (official TED translation). Thus, to keep the prosodic clash between negative and positive semantic prosodies, grim inspiration was translated by optimisme sombre (‘dark optimism’). Moreover, semantic preferences may pose a problem for translation. (5)Any mother can tell you how much time and energy it takes to liquify her body – to literally dissolve herself – (Laughter) as she feeds this precious little cannibal. (Laughter) (Hinde, 2016). (6)Toute mère peut vous dire le temps et l'énergie que cela prend de liquéfier son corps – de littéralement se dissoudre – (Rires) en nourrissant ce précieux petit cannibale. (Rires) (Official TED translation). For instance, precious little tends [5] to describe a baby or a young animal. Its frequent right collocates include darling, angel, granddaughter, baby, girl, boy, pup in the EnTenTen21 corpus. In our example, this semantic preference is transgressed by cannibal, which in this context still refers to a baby. In French précieux and petit, the literal translation of precious and little, do not co-occur as frequently as the English collocation (with frequencies 0.43 and 0.05 per million tokens in EnTenTen21 and FrTenTen20 corpora respectively) and does not share the described semantic preference. To preserve the aforementioned semantic clash, we suggest adorable petit cannibale, because adorable petit [6] (‘adorable little’) is a collocation (with the frequency of 0.14 per million tokens in FrTenTen20 corpus) and shares the same semantic preference by collocating with babies, young animals and affective words: frimousse, chiot, garçon, puce, chéri, bébé, fille. There are some similarities and differences between the use of humorous linguistic incongruities in English and French original. Prosodic and semantic clashes are the most frequent in both corpora. However, preliminary results show that relexicalizations (5 out of 20 versus 6 out of 38 examples) and neologisms (4 out of 20 versus 4 out of 38 examples) are more frequent in French original corpus than in English. Another example found only in the French original corpus is the repetition of the same humorous mechanism within the same context, but with different words. (7)La discrimination positive, ça coince quelque part. Essayez de remplacer 'discrimination positive' par 'ségrégation positive'. Vous verrez que ça coince quelque part. Eh bien, c’est comme la droite sociale, la shoah douce, les frappes chirurgicales, le nucléaire propre. Non, ça coince quelque part ! L’apartheid solidaire, non plus, ça ne marche pas. (Rires) L’inceste tendre. Non plus. (Rires) Non, moyen (TED, 2012). (8)Positive discrimination, it doesn't quite roll off the tongue. Try to replace "positive discrimination" with "positive segregation". You see it doesn't quite roll off the tongue. So, it's like the social right, the gentle holocaust, the surgical typo, clean nuclear energy. No, it doesn't roll of the tongue! Not the united apartheid, that doesn't work. (Laughter) Not even soft incest. (Laugher) No, just okay (official TED translation). Here the prosodic clashes and oxymorons are expressed in a series of different instances and repeated seven times. Such repetitions occur in two more examples in the French original corpus and never in the English one. Finally, we also intend to discuss whether such results can be used for teaching English-French translation.

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hal-05148937 , version 1 (07-07-2025)

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  • HAL Id : hal-05148937 , version 1

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Anastasia Buturlakina, Natalie Kübler. Translation and contrastive analysis of collocational verbal humour in English-French TED Talks transcripts bidirectional corpora: findings. Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (7th edition), Jul 2023, Poznan, Poland. ⟨hal-05148937⟩
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