As the Edinburgh Fringe, the world’s largest arts festival, came to a close last week, 323 venues across the city will undoubtedly be taking a moment to catch their breath after hosting a record total of 3,841 shows and 59,600 performances.

Only the Olympics and the World Cup surpass the Fringe for the number of tickets sold, with over 3 million people having flocked to Edinburgh this August.

But there’s one stand-out stat from this year’s Fringe that reflects the event’s extraordinary international spirit. The Guardian reported that the Festival was due to ‘break records for internationalism’ as the Scottish capital hosted artists from 63 countries and an audience from over 50 countries.

Given that comedy is synonymous with the Fringe (the genre takes up over one-third of the Festival programme), it is interesting that the Fringe consistently attracts a global set of festival-goers and performers.

After all, comedy is notoriously difficult to translate and is often culture and country-specific. Nobody is more aware of this than the top global brands, who have long made faux pas when attempting to convey humour in their multilingual marketing and advertising.

Why, then, is the Fringe so loved by an international crowd? What makes comedy work in different cultural or linguistic contexts? And what can make it a spectacular failure?

Let’s explore some of the successes, as well as the trials and tribulations, of humour in translation, and how you can make it work for your brand.

Picture of legendary figure of humour, Mr Bean

More than words

If a picture speaks a thousand words, then Rowan Atkinson’s Mr. Bean must be one of the world’s greatest communicators.

Mr. Bean’s physical, slapstick comedy was and still is a global success. His 15-part 30-minute live action adventures were sold to over 190 countries in the 1990s, whilst the 2007 feature film Mr Bean’s Holiday took profits of £156 million across 65 countries.

Mr. Bean plays on the stereotype of the clumsy, hapless Brit which, coupled with the lack of dialogue, creates a type of comedy that seems to be able to transcend linguistic and cultural barriers. It’s not hard to see why the character became an international smash hit.

Similarly, at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, Fishbowl, a wordless slapstick comedy about three neighbours living in a Parisian apartment block, was met with rave reviews in the press, both nationally and internationally.

Clearly, this is a formula that works. It proves that, regardless of what language you speak, physical comedy can be a unifying force.

If you are a brand looking to expand internationally, consider the impact of using humorous imagery and visuals in your marketing rather than words.

It is a wise idea to invest in professional localisation services to ensure that your content is perfectly suited to your target market. This will avoid your images causing unnecessary offence or misunderstanding, a very real possibility in cross-cultural marketing.

Punny or not?

Streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime boast vast comedy library, whether it be the latest stand-up comedy special, an original romcom or a classic Monty Python-esque romp.

The brilliant thing about these services is that, regardless of the original language of the content, there is a myriad of languages available as subtitles or dubbing options.

But with time and space constraints, subtitlers and voice over artists are usually forced to truncate, paraphrase or take a more word-for-word approach to the translation, often resulting in a very literal rendering of the humour.

This means that most puns lose their meaning when translated into other languages, especially when translating from English.

The language of humour

Accroding to Ted Mentele, Didactics Editor for Babbel, “Ambiguity of meaning is a common trope in English-language humour. This stems from the fact that we have so many homophones — words that sound the same but have different meanings.”

“Since homophones in one language are rarely also homophones in another language, this makes translating them pretty useless.”

“When we derive humour from playing with language itself, we step into difficult territory for non-native speakers.”

So, if puns and ‘dad jokes’ are an important to the voice of your brand, consider that it may be better to steer clear of using them in video content – subtitles can often kill a comedic timing or a cleverly-constructed joke.

But don’t write off using humour in your international marketing strategy altogether.

While translating humour may be one of the most difficult elements of translation, a skilled professional translator will be capable of finding an alternative joke or pun in the target language that packs the same punch as that of the source text.

The key is finding a translation agency that you trust and has with plenty of experience working with similar projects.

Get in touch with Wolfestone today and discover how we can find your funny.

by Wolfestone Admin

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