Translating Humorous Expressions into Arabic with Reference to Loss, Gain, and Compensation

This study is concerned with translating humorous expressions from English into the Arabic Language with reference to Loss, Gain, and Compensation. The idea of the research developed from an observation by the researcher that when the target audience watches a drama of funny episodes, it is hard to interact, laugh or even smile, although the drama may be accompanied by subtitles in Arabic language. The study aims to illustrate the causes of untanslatability and loss, gain, and compensation in humor translation. To achieve the aims of the study, the researcher selected a sample of 10 humorous quotes and jokes from different hilarious resources, including episodes, movies, and sitcoms and other plays. The study was conducted qualitatively and descriptively by meticulously analyzing the translated quotes to probe the causes of loss in humor translation. The study results showed that humorous expressions encounter loss, gain and compensation which require a deep understanding of context and require a sense of humor from the audience and translators besides SL culture involvement. Moreover, the overall findings showed that many humorous expressions have no counterparts in Arabic Language, therefore, loss and gain and compensations are inevitable. Based on the findings, the study concluded that humorous expressions are more frequent and with multi-version and lack the equivalence in Arabic language. It also concluded that the types of humor are an essential element in reducing the sharp difference between the SL quote and its equivalent in the TL and the loss of humor in many cases is inevitable. Finally, the study explicated the main causes and the necessary strategies of loss, gain and compensation to transfer humor into Arabic Language.


INTRODUCTION
Translating any portion of a language requires a deep understanding of the quote to be translated, let alone the components related to human emotion and behavior. For instance, a positive segment can be interpreted negatively by the audience. In other words, what may be humorous in one language cannot be humorous in another. Sometimes if an individual attempts to be funny, this sense of humor seems to be an offensive one for others in different languages and cultures. However, humor is the part and parcel of everyday communication and extensively used by authors when composing literary works such as comedy and dramatic events. It is deeply rooted in a specific cultural and linguistic context, and an indispensable element of intercultural communication and mass entertainment. According to the Cambridge Dictionary, humor is the ability to laugh and know that something is funny. In this study, the researcher attempts to shed light on the nature and causes that impede translating the hilarious expressions in the TL (Arabic Language) and identify the best strategies to be II. What are the causes of loss, gain and compensation in humor translation?

LITERATURE REVIEW
Scholars posit many definitions of humor as an emotional aspect and cognitive experience that cause laughter and amusement. Zhang (2012) points out that there is no unanimous agreement among scholars upon one definition. So there are various definitions were used to illustrate it. According to DE Gabriele and Walsh (2010: 225-6), humor is a universal phenomenon in human interaction that starts at very early ages in children. In Vandaele's view (2010:147), humor is what causes mirth, amusement, and spontaneous laughter or even smile. Psychologists envisage humor as a treatment and as a source of stress reduction and often used to provide hope for life and replace the negative aspects of human life. Humor is broken into three main components: wit, mirth, and laughter. Wit is the cognitive experience, while mirth is the emotional experience, and Laughter is the physiological experience.
There are many collocates related to humor. A sense of humor is an aspect that gives someone the ability to say funny things and see the funny side of things. A dry sense of humor, on the other hand, is the type of humor, somebody has when a person with dry sense humor tells a joke that it is not always obviously funny, i.e. it is dry sense since it doesn't produce amusement.
The term humor derived from Latin and it denotes human body fluid. During the era of the Renaissance, a human body was believed to have four different fluids: Blood, Phlegm, Yellow bile, and Black bile (Lili 2012: 94). These fluids are regarded as parameters of a human mood. For instance, a person with an imbalanced proportion of these four fluids is assumed to be out of humor. The general sense of the term 'humor' was used for centuries to refer to a person's temperament, until the 16 th century, when the term was used by the English dramatist Ben Jonson. He used the term to refer to the actions of a peculiar or absurd person. In the 18 th century, 'humor' became an "aesthetic term that was invested with the present meaning; that is, to reflect something aesthetic in a ridiculous way" (Ibid) is humorous or address humorous themes.

Categories of Humor
A joke is a funny expression category that provokes laughter when said by a person in a hilarious situation. Sharzer (1985:216) defines it as a discourse unit that consists of two segments: the first one is known as the setup of the joke whereas the second one is known as the punch-line. According to Hockett 1972:153, a joke has three components: Buildup, pivot, and punch line. The first part presents the joke while the pivot is an expression that creates the climax of the joke. Finally, the punch line is the expression that ends the joke and has an effect on the target audience. Thus, the laughter is produced at the end.
Example of a joke and its translation: Build-up: A thief broke into my house last night. Pivot: He started searching for money, The Punch line: so I woke up and search with him.

‫وبدأت‬ ‫فجأة‬ ‫فأستيقظت‬ ‫النقود،‬ ‫عن‬ ‫يبحث‬ ‫وبدأ‬ ‫أمس‬ ‫ليلة‬ ‫منزلي‬ ‫لص‬ ‫دخل‬ ‫معه‬ ‫.البحث‬
Pun/Wordplay is the double meaning of a word, one is metaphorical and the other is literal. This playing of meanings, forms a fertile source of humor (Freud 1960: 39). Some authors use the term wordplay for different kinds of play on language, such as parody, anagram, spoonerism and transformed allusion (Low, 2011:62 Korkut (2005: 14) as "an intentional imitation -of a text, style, genre, or discourse -which includes an element of humor and which has an aim of interpreting its target in one way or another. "Spoof movie" Example: A little daughter puts on her father's big shoes and stomps around in them, saying, "I need to make a business call. I am a very busy, very important businessman!" ‫وكانت‬ ‫أعمال،‬ ‫رجل‬ ‫أنها‬ ‫وادعت‬ ‫الكبير‬ ‫والدها‬ ‫حذاء‬ ‫صغيرة‬ ‫فتاة‬ ‫ارتدت‬ ‫بالعمل‬ ‫خاصة‬ ‫هامة‬ ‫مكالمة‬ ‫ولدي‬ ، ً ‫جدا‬ ‫ومشغول‬ ‫مهم‬ ‫شخص‬ ‫أنني‬ ‫.تقول‬ Satire is a way of criticizing people or ideas in a humorous way, especially in order to make a political point, or a piece of writing that uses this style. Hutcheon defines satire as technique employed by writers to expose and criticize foolishness and corruption of an individual or a society, by using humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule.
Example: Husband should be like Kleenex: soft, strong, and disposable. (Clue 1985) ‫منها‬ ‫التخلص‬ ‫ويسهل‬ ‫وقوية‬ ‫ناعمة‬ ‫كلينكس‬ ‫كمناديل‬ ‫االزواج‬ ‫يكون‬ ‫أن‬ ‫.يجب‬ Spoonerisms are defined by Oxford Dictionaries as "a verbal error in which a speaker accidentally transposes the initial sounds or letters of two or more words, often to humorous effect". These are unintentional speech error made by people and they become source of humor in everyday life and they have been used in some TV shows to evoke laughter. The term takes its name after an English teacher at Oxford University, Archibald Spooner, during the 1800s.
Example: I fool so feelish. ‫بالغباء‬ ‫اشعر‬ Retorts are defined as "a quick, witty, or cutting reply; especially: one that turns back or counters the first speaker's words". In other words, humor arises when the second speaker pretends that he misunderstood the first speaker's previous utterance and therefore distorts the "intended meaning" and creates a different one (Dynel : 1292. A retort can contain different techniques of humor, including aggression, ambiguity and rhetorical questions. Teasing is a common practice in human social life in which people tease each other in a playful way for different purposes (e.g.,, To socialize, to pass the time, and to IJALEL 8(6):16-22 mock). Some researchers state that an aggression is a possible feature of teasing (e.g., Alberts 1992, Warm 1997), while others stress that teasing stands between aggression and love (e.g., Brenman 1952). Jill: You manifest the Peter Pan syndrome. Jack: And you have the Captain Hook syndrome. (Teasing) Jill: There's no such syndrome. Jack: Obviously there is. You have it! (Teasing) (Dynel : 1293 ‫بان‬ ‫بيتر‬ ‫متالزمة‬ ‫من‬ ‫تعاني‬ ‫إنك‬ ‫.جيل:‬ ‫هوك‬ ‫كابتن‬ ‫متالزمة‬ ‫من‬ ‫تعاني‬ ‫وأنت‬ ‫.جاك:‬ ‫المتالزمة‬ ‫هذه‬ ‫توجد‬ ‫ال‬ ‫.جيل:‬ ‫منها‬ ‫تعاني‬ ‫وإنك‬ ‫توجد،‬ ‫بل‬ ‫.جاك:‬ Banter refers to the situation when a one-turn these between two interlocutors leads to a long exchange of remarks in a humorous and teasing way. Norrick (1993:29) defines banter as a "rapid exchange of humorous lines oriented toward a common theme, though aimed primarily at mutual entertainment rather than topical talk" According to Dynel ( : 1293, banter is not only spoken but it can occur in written form, especially social media (e.g., Skype). This suggests that this type of humor is connected to social intimacy, in which both the speaker and hearer use positive impoliteness (6) and untrue statements to show solidarity (Lehikoinen 2012: 9). There are many theories of humor, which attempt to define humor and explain why we laugh how we recognize. However, despite this large number of theories and publications, humor has "remained a puzzle to the best minds we have produced" (Berger 1987: 2).

What Makes us Laugh?
Modern theories such as Raskin attempted to provide a complete explanation of humor. Generally speaking, there are three theory types used in humor: essentialist, teleological and substantial (Attardo 1994: 1). The first theory, essentialists is to provide the necessary and sufficient conditions for a phenomenon. Teleological theories describe the goals of a phenomenon and how its mechanisms are shaped and determined by its goals. The purpose of substantial theories is to find the unifying factor for the explanation of the phenomenon in the concrete "contents" of the phenomena.

Theories of Translating Humor
The major theories of Translating humor are: 1. Incongruity Theories The incongruity theory states that humor happens at the moment of the realization of incongruity (contrast) between a concept involved within a certain context and the real objects thought to be related somehow to the concept.

Superiority Theory
This theory was founded by the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (Schwarz 2010: 46). The Superiority theory claims that people laugh when they feel superior at others because the person who laughs always looks down on whatever he laughs at. Thus, this theory concludes that all humor is about mocking others.

Relief Theory
This theory was first introduced by Sigmund Freud. It is mainly concerned with the reception of humor and its psychological effects on the recipient. These theories consider humor as a means of reducing and relieving psychological tension caused by social rules and constraints, especially when talking about certain topics considered as taboo (Raskin 1985: 38-39).

Linguistic theories of humor
Linguistic theories focus only on the linguistic meaning by which humor is conveyed, ignoring nonverbal forms of humor such as "slapstick comedy and accidental humor" (Martin 2007: 110). These theories approach humor from syntactic, pragmatic and semantic points of view. Two of the most influential linguistic theories of humor are the semantic script theory of humor (SSTH), and the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH. The first theory focuses on the script as a cognitive structure of organized information and knowledge about the world.
In linguistic terms, a script is equivalent to the lexical meaning of a word. A script contains all the necessary information such as subject, activity, place, time, condition and so on. Using these criteria we can describe any situation to make a sufficient overview and connect it with a proper context. The second theory was proposed by Raskin and Attardo and focuses on verbal jokes. Theory identified six levels of independent knowledge resources. These include the script opposition, logical mechanism, situation, target, narrative strategy, and language.

Translating Humor: Loss, Gain, and Compensation
When humor is translated into Arabic, it undergoes some sort of loss and gain in translating humor due to the discrepancy between the source language and the target. With respect, Basnett -McGuire (1991: 30) also, state that: Once the principle is accepted that sameness cannot exist between two languages, it becomes possible to approach the question of loss and gain in the translation process. It is again an indication of the low status of translation that so much time should have been spent on discussing what is lost in the transfer of a text from SL to TL whilst ignoring what can, also, be gained, for the translator can at times enrich or clarify the SL text as a direct result of the translation process. In this sense, Munday (2016:92) Translation does inevitably involve some loss, since it is impossible to preserve all the ST nuances of meaning and structure in the TL. However, importantly a TT may make up for ('compensate') this by introducing gain at the same or another point in the text. Loss is defined by Dizdar (2014) as the incomplete replication of the source language in the target language. Loss is broken down into two categories: inevitable loss and avertable loss. The first category is due to sharp dissimilarities between languages of distant families like the case of English and Arabic. The second category is due to the incompetence of the translator and the translator fails in conveying the humorous expressions in the target language because of lack of knowledge and limited linguistic awareness. Hervey and Higgins view translation loss as "an important corollary of this concept of translation loss is that it embraces any failure to replicate an ST exactly, whether this involves losing features in the TT or adding them" Scholars of translation classified translation loss at several levels. Morphological loss occurs word levels, in which one vocabulary item is untranslatable because the counterpart does not exist in the TL. These words are mostly loaned or borrowed words. Syntactic loss occurs when there are not equivalent between structures of clauses and sentences in SL. Semantic loss takes place when meaning is not fully converted into the target language. Pragmatic loss is hard to achieve as it depends on the intention of the speaker when he utters verbal humor in the SL and not fully converted to the TL. Textual loss and Stylistic loss are interrelated with each other. The humorous style of a text is changed when rendering a humorous expression into the Arabic language.
Compensation is the procedure which in the last resort ensures the translation is possible (Newmark 1991:143-144). Newmark (1991) also believes all puns, alliteration, rhyme, slang, metaphor and pregnant words can be compensated in translation. Harvey(1989) illustrates that "compensation is a technique which involves making up for the loss of source text effect by recreating a similar effect in the target text through means that are specific to the target language and/or text"(as cited in Baker, 1998:37).

Categories of Compensation
Compensation falls into three types: Compensation in kind: in this type, the translator is compensating a loss of meaning by changing implicit for explicit and the vice versa, and the denotative meaning of connotative meaning and the vice versa.
Compensation in place: this type entails a change in place of the ST textual effect.
Compensation by splitting or merging: This typically entails the addition or deletion of information by a translator when no single equivalent found in the TL. Bryant (2009) says that compensation is vital in translating humor since there is an inevitable loss in some phrases and meanings in an ST that cannot be translated into the target language. He says "Even the best translators in the world will encounter fragments of text that simply are too peculiar to be able to be reproduced in a TT without translation loss, and given the inevitability of translation loss, ways have been developed to offset it. This is what is referred to as compensation in the translation field."

The Requirements of Translating Humor
To translate humor, translators and interpreters must overcome the cross-cultural obstacles created by the differences in norms, expectations, incongruities existing in the two cultures. They must resort to adaptations which they select on the basis of equivalence between acts, expressions, or visual representations in the source and in the target communities. This means that they "will have to find situations in both languages which, although not similar, will evoke the same concepts, feelings, emotions, or reactions" (Niedzielski 1984: 155 cited in Larson 2008 As general rule humor is translated by the equivalent humor in the target language (Arabic). Universal humor is easy to convert to Arabic because linguistic and cultural requirements are shared globally in the SL and TL. However, when the linguistic aspect is not shared in the SL and the TL, it is hard to translate into the target language. Culturespecific humor is untranslatable and, usually, there is a loss of meaning and the humor is expired to be stripped out of its humorous sense.
El Refaie (2011: 87) attributes the success or failure in the understanding of humor to both personal and social reasons. "The understanding and appreciation of humor depend not only upon an individual's background knowledge, cultural values, and psychological makeup but also on the broader social context in which a joke occurs and the social uses to which it is put." The translator of humor should, therefore, keep in mind the target audience, their beliefs, culture, and religion.
Humor is created in a specific cultural and linguistic context, thus posing a challenge for translators. When translating humor the aim for the translator is not only to decide whether the target audience understands the humor but also that the translator has been able to render the same humorous effect in the TL. Humor is considered to be a great challenge for translators. It is often seen as a paradigm case of "untranslatability": "When it comes to translating humor, the operation proves to be as desperate as that of translating poetry" Diot (1989:84).

Strategies for Translating Humor
There are many strategies can be implemented to translate humor. These strategies have been used by Vinay and Darbelnet. Vinay and Darbelnet (cited in Mundy, 2016:88) suggest two main strategies and seven procedures for translation in general and these procedures can be followed to translate humor: Borrowing: The source language word is converted directly to the target language word. The word doesn't exist in that SL, so it is borrowed into the TL. For example: (Peter Pan and Captain Hook). The word captain is borrowed in the above humorous expression and rendered as ‫.كابتن‬ Calque: It is a type of borrowing where the SL expression or structure is transferred in a literal translation. For example: You are Captain Hook. ‫هوك‬ ‫كابتن‬ ‫.أنت‬ Literal translation: Vinay and Darbelnet means 'wordfor-word' translation, which is acceptable and not loss in translating humor when translating between languages of the same family and culture. However, in the case of English and Arabic, there is a loss of meaning. For example: I finally realized that the people are the prisoners of their phone. That is why they called a cell phone.
Transposition: This strategy involves a change of one word class for another in the TL (e.g., Noun to verb) without changing the sense of the sentence. For example: Stop trying to make fetch happen. ً ‫ممكنا‬ ‫المستحيل‬ ‫تجعل‬ ‫ال‬ Modulation: This procedure changes the semantics and point of view of the source language to another. It is not difficult to make people. ‫نم‬ ‫لهسلا‬ ‫نأ‬ ‫دعسن‬ ‫سانلا‬ Equivalence or idiomatic translation: This procedure refers to cases where languages describe the same situation by different stylistic or structural means. For example: (Don't put words in people's mouths, put the turkey in people's mouth).
Adaptation: This involves changing the cultural reference when a situation in the source culture does not exist in the target culture. The above example of (Peter Pan and Captain Hook) shows this strategy.

METHODS
The main method adopted in this specific study is descriptive qualitative which attempts to describe loss and gain and compensation of humorous expressions in the Arabic language and suggest a solution for these phenomena. This approach is relevant to this kind of study as it requires all-encompassing perspective methods to handle the loss issues in translating humorous expressions. The population of this study includes quotes, jokes and other humorous expressions taken from movies, sitcoms and literature books. The researchers inspect the quotes, jokes and humorous expressions to analyze the phenomenon of translatability using specific translation Strategies and using compensation to solve the problems of the untranslatability of humorous expressions. The sample of the analysis is taken from the books by using the proportional random sampling technique. The main instrument used in analyzing data is content-based analysis.

DISCUSSION
The researcher selected ten expressions and attempted the analysis on the basis of the possibility, the expectancy and causes of loss, gain and compensation: 1. "It's Just a Flesh Wound" It is a humorous expression said in a battle between the King and the black knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975). As the black knight loses his limb, the king asks him to stop fighting and surrender, he said: "It's Just a Flesh Wound". When translating this expression, it is difficult to convert it into a funny one in the Arabic Language due to the difference in culture connotation in each. The equivalence, in this case, will be ‫جسدي"‬ ‫على‬ ‫خدش‬ ‫مجرد‬ ‫."إنه‬ However, if the target receptor of the translation watched the movie, he may share the discomfort with black Knight because of the target culture. Thus, there is a loss of humor due to the context and cultural differences. Compensation is possible. However, it is still humorless.

"I'm just one stomach flu away from my goal weight."
This is a humorous expression said by Emily in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), an American comedy-drama. It means, if a person catches stomach flu, s/he will lose weight due to the strategy of throwing up so much and eating so little food and he will reach his goals sooner than following a strict diet. The suggest translation for the expression is ‫وزني‬ ‫بنقص‬ ‫وذلك‬ ‫هدفي‬ ‫تحقيق‬ ‫على‬ ‫أوشك‬ ‫الفيروسي‬ ‫المعدة‬ ‫بالتهاب‬ ‫.بسبب‬ This translation may not reflect a sense of humor due to the linguistic barrier and it may be interpreted differently in the target culture. If the audiences watched the movie, then they may have different interpretations for the incidence. However, the best option for a translator is to acquaint the audience with the other pragmatic factors and implications to facilitate comprehending humor.

Stop trying to make fetch happen
This funny quote is taken from a movie called Mean Girls. The quote means when a person misreads or miscalculates a social situation, it is hard for him to make it happen. This indicates that it is impossible to change a thing into an alternative one. The funny part of this quote is the facial expression accompanied the utterance of the quote. Thus, the funny sense of this expression is heart to recognize. When translating it, as if a translator strip it of its hilarious sense. The accurate translation may be ً ‫ممكنا‬ ‫المستحيل‬ ‫جعل‬ ‫عن‬ ‫.توفق‬ 4. Don't put words in people's mouths, put turkey in people's mouth This expression is taken from Friends sitcom. It is hilarious in SL and in TL. The sense of this quote is obvious since its bottom-line is shared in both languages. So, it is easy for a translator to convert it to its full meaning with its connotation and implication into the target language. However, the translator should choose a literal translation strategy over a free translation strategy to keep the funny part of the expression. This joke is opposite to the previous one in which the humor is created in the target language, though the source language expression appears to be humorless. The source language is Arabic and the target language was English. The expression was made funnier by gaining a new word in the Target language in a form of word play. The source Expression is ‫جديدة‬ ‫حقيبة‬ ‫العراق‬ ‫من‬ ‫أب‬ ‫قدم‬ ‫الحقيبة‬ ‫على‬ ‫أبي‬ ‫يا‬ ً ‫شكرا‬ ‫الفتاة‬ ‫قالت‬ ‫البنته،‬ ‫.هدية‬ This indicates that the original expression is not funny. However, it is made funny making the blending the words "Bag + Dad" and made into a compound.

THE MAJOR FINDINGS OF THE STUDY
This study analyzed the humorous expression and the possibility of converting them with the same equivalent effect in the TL. The researcher explored almost all strategies of converting humorous expression with the same sense. However, and due to the sharp difference between Arabic and English, the translator was encountered by the constraints of loss, gain, and compensation. Thus, the researcher reached the following findings: • Translating humorous expressions is demanding and requires understanding the differences between the SL and TL in terms of creating a translating effect specifically when dealing with issues related to emotion and feeling. • Humor is bound by linguistic and cultural challenges.
However, universal humor is easy to translate which culture-specific humor is hard to convey its humorous sense in the TC. • Loss, gain and compensation are inevitable when rendering humor into any language. However, when languages are closed, this phenomenon is less frequent. • To translate humor, the translator needs to use all types of compensation. • Literary taste and humorous taste are essential elements in translating humorous expressions because in many cases, humor needs deep understanding.

CONCLUSION
This research addressed the issues of translating humor in Arabic. It introduced the humor, its types with examples, the origin of humor and the causes of the difficulties of translating humor in terms of linguistic constraints and cultural challenges. According to the discussion and the findings of the study, humor is not easy to convert to the target language without the translation loss of humor. In universal humor, it is easy to comprehend and create the best humorous equivalence. In other types of humor, such as linguistic and cultural ones, humorous equivalence is unattainable, whether in translating jokes or sitcom quotes or in any other humorous category. Moreover, the study showed several types of loss, including lexical, syntactic, phonological and pragmatic ones. It also showed that these losses lead to challenges of style, literary taste, context and other pragmatic features which are mostly untranslatable and inevitable. Therefore, a translator is required to follow the proper strategy to ensure a level of accuracy and humorous connotation in divergent context.