Incongruity-specific British and American Humour from the Perspective of Translation Studies
Incongruity-specific British and American Humour from the Perspective of Translation Studies

Summary/Abstract: The aim of this study is to reveal how the specifics of incongruity creating the comic influence the choice of the strategy while representing it in Ukrainian translations of J. K. Jerome’s and O. Henry’s flash fiction. First, using the methodological principles of linguoculturology, the influence of sociocultural context on the British and American authors’ consciousness, which determined the cultural aspect of their individual worldview and the specifics of their sense of humour, is revealed. Then the comically marked contexts in J. K. Jerome’s and O. Henry’s flash fiction were identified using the methodology of linguopoetic research, and the features of incongruity creating the comic in their works were revealed applying the methods of cognitive linguistics. At the final stage, the translation analysis of the distinguished comically marked contexts was performed evaluating the strategies used for representing the comic in Ukrainian translation. The analysis of the research material eluci¬dates the following conclusions. The cultural background of the British or American writer determines the specifics of comic incongruity (logical, notional, valorative and ontological) embodied in their flash fiction which, in its turn, strongly influences the choice of the translation strategy. The comic in J. K. Jerome’s fiction is represented in Ukrainian translations mostly by using the strategies of preservation and localization, while O. Henry’s humour is rendered by using localization and addition. Hence, the strategies of representing the comic in Ukrainian translation highly depend on the idea of the comic in the author’s and the target reader’s consciousness.

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