Hi！NOVA池袋西口校です👥
本日はTom先生が英語のダジャレについてお話ししてくれました(* ´艸｀)
The Linguistic Merits of Puns and Dad Jokes
Thomas Lipschultz
Before I came to Japan, I worked as a translator for video games. My job was to take popular Japanese games and translate the dialogue from them into English, so people who don’t speak any Japanese can play and enjoy them.
My favorite things to translate were always bad jokes — specifically, puns (ダジャレ) and “dad jokes” (おやじギャグ). We have these same kinds of jokes in English, but because the two languages are so different, it’s a big challenge to adapt Japanese puns and dad jokes into English.
As an example, there was one game where a character who loves bad jokes saw a tree, and he said, 「気になる木だ。」 I translated this to English as, “Something about this tree in-tree-gues me.” Do you understand the joke? I took the word “intrigues” (which means “interests very much“) and changed the “tri” in the middle to the word “tree.” I think this is very similar to the Japanese joke, and English speakers who read it will feel just as cold as Japanese speakers who read the original line.
There are lots of popular puns and dad jokes in English, and translating them to Japanese might be a good way to understand the language a little better. Here are ten examples; can you understand what they mean? How might you say them in Japanese to express the same idea? (If you don’t understand any of them, feel free to ask your NOVA instructor to explain next time you have a lesson!)
1. Is your refrigerator running? Well, then you’d better catch it!
2. I wasn’t sure if that was a car speeding toward me or not. Then it hit me.
3. Having a boiled egg for breakfast every day is unbeatable.
4. A pessimist’s blood type is always B-negative.
5. Are you working hard, or hardly working?
6. You can tune a guitar, but you can’t tuna fish. Unless, of course, you play bass.
7. Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt.
8. I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. It was riveting!
9. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
10. Today, my son asked me, “Can I have a bookmark?”, and I was so upset. He’s 11 years old, but he still doesn’t know my name is Brian!
And finally, here’s an English + Japanese pun I wrote a few years ago. Please enjoy:
Q: If you lose your suitcase, what is the best Disney/Pixar movie to watch when searching for it?
A: Finding Dory. だって、ファインディング・ニモ・ツーでしょう？
陽気なTom先生( ´∀｀ )
皆さん、Tomが作ったこのダジャレの意味分かりましたか？
ニモ・ツー、ニモツ、荷物ですね❕❕🐠(笑)(笑)
違う言語でダジャレを作るのは難しいかもしれないですね🤨
Tom先生が作った例文もとっても難しいので、わからないものがあったら
是非、池袋西口校の先生に聞いてみてください🐟
★★池袋の英会話スクールはNOVA池袋西口校★★
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