I've often wondered about the difficulty, if not impossibility, of
translating not just humor but vernacular language in general.  I've had
international students who love the works of Twain from first encountering
it in their native languages, who are deeply perplexed when they read it in
my courses in the original.

As has been long recognized, there are subtle and not so subtle differences
between speakers, and conveying those in a different language medium are
beyond me.  How, for example, does one signal the difference between Pap and
the Duke? The problem of working with black dialect is even more thorny.
Black vernacular speech has been a challenge even for American writers,
regardless of color.  Given that, how would one begin to translate Jim's
story about his daughter?  So much of the pathos of that account comes
through his vernacular language.

A corollary might be the Quebec French dialect of joual.  When English
translators approached these texts they opted to use a kind of Scottish
dialect because it represented a similar distance from standard British
English as joual does to standard French.  I'm not entirely happy with the
result, and I'm suspicious about framing Jim's speech as Italian peasant
dialect if one were to translate _HF_ into Italian (though I suppose his
language might be cast in Sicilian vernacular, whereas Tom Sawyer could be
rendered in some other provincial idiom).   The politics of verancular in
American language seem far more complex than that choice would be able to
represent.

The discussion that Shelley Fishkin initiated more than a decade ago about
Huck's speech as derived from black dialect involved some of the same
issues.  I'm wondering what others who've thought about this problem have to
say about what the implications for translation are.

Larry Howe