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