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@Linguist_CIOL OCTOBER/NOVEMBER The Linguist 27 REVIEWS Did you hear the one about the linguist who analysed humour? Well, it wasn't funny and the joke died! As Salvatore Attardo declares appositely in this book: one night arriving at a comedy club to meet his colleagues, he asks the barman where the academic conference group is sitting. He is told, "You'll find them… They are the ones not laughing." The dominant theory of verbal humour is that of incongruity. Typically, the joke teller offers a schema (S1) based on a common understanding of an everyday transaction or personality trait which the listener/reader understands and accepts. However, the schema departs from the norm (S2) and confounds the listener's expectations. Only once the feeling of vagueness mixed with ambiguity has been resolved can the incongruous become the congruous, and laughter ensue, all within 600 milliseconds. Incongruity can be backgrounded in jokes or cartoons that demonstrate a "local logic". Talking animals or little green men require a willing suspension of disbelief. The script is "framed" for humour, so we accept the absurd or surreal premise. Freud, Bergson and Koestler articulated parts of this theory and referred to "comic contrast", "two strings of thought tied together" and "a contradiction in terms" respectively in their analyses of jokes. Syntactic ambiguity occurs when parsing wrongly assigns a phrase in a sentence and two meanings arise. Attardo cites Groucho Marx: "I shot an elephant in my pajamas – how he got in my pajamas, I don't know". The prepositional phrase can be attached to the verb phrase or the noun phrase. The former is unmarked for humour, the latter is marked. Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word has two distinct meanings, most directly in homonymy. A favourite of mine is: "Two parrots are sitting on a perch. One says to the other, 'Can you smell fish?'" Homophony, soundalikes and polysemy make us mirthful through the "liberation of nonsense" (Freud). Attardo, a Professor of Linguistics at Texas A&M University, debates the translatability of humour. It should be translated when circumstances allow, he states, but puns are always too problematic in interpreting, especially given the time constraints. He presents the case of an interpreter who, unable to render a joke in the target language, asks the audience to laugh (to save the face of the speaker). The Linguistics of Humor draws on a broad range of sources and would be of interest as a reference source to psychologists and philosophers of language, as well as to linguists. Graham Elliott MCIL The Linguistics of Humor: An introduction Salvatore Attardo OUP, 2020 496 pp; ISBN 978-0198791287 Paperback £29.99 Translators generally keep a low profile in the visual media and elsewhere, though every now and again they are called upon to take centre stage (e.g. in the popular films Lost in Translation and The Interpreter). This provides an opportunity to highlight such matters as translation's essential role as a cultural bridge and the unassuming but vital work carried out by language practitioners. These are the themes you would expect to be discussed in Representing Translation: The representation of translation and translators in contemporary media. Unfortunately, it turns out that only one of the book's nine chapters actually deals with the depiction of translators or interpreters in cinema, video and television. Additionally, about half of the book's content does not address its supposed subject matter at all, with chapters instead on TV censorship, captioning and social media jargon. A contribution concerning advertising localisation in China does at least involve translation, but fails to discuss representation in any manner. These anomalies seriously undermine the work's usefulness for readers actually seeking to find out how translators and the translation process are portrayed. The book is redeemed to some extent by two fine contributions, one on the subject of translating Shakespeare's Hamlet in contemporary China, and the other on the cinematic depiction of interpreters in war zones. These essays illustrate, in the first case, how translation can bring together apparently diverse cultures and epochs, underlining the universality of human fears and aspirations; and in the second, the importance of raising public awareness about the dangers and ethical dilemmas faced by interpreters working in combat situations. They also inadvertently serve to underline the extent to which this book is a wasted opportunity. Ross Smith MCIL Representing Translation Dror Abend-David (ed.) Bloomsbury Academic, 2020 248 pp; ISBN 978-1501368141 Paperback £28.99