This master’s thesis analyses the translation of humour into Slovene and Japanese on the basis of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night using Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH) and the translation approaches of Peter Newmark and Christiane Nord. Intra-textual and extra-textual factors, including cultural influences, are investigated by means of a contrastive analysis of the translation of two Slovenian and two Japanese translations. The analysis also covers philological, linguistic, interpretative and cultural issues of translation and their impact on the translations. The analysis shows that philological and interpretative problems are negligible for the translation of the present work. Linguistic problems related to the diversity of word meanings and connotations are of greater relevance. Challenges also arise in cultural transmission, including cultural coherence, the incommensurability of cultural characteristics and the cultural-historical characteristics of Shakespeare's works. The results of the contrastive analysis of knowledge resources show that the humour in the work is based to a greater extent on script contrast and often involves mixing of characters and word play. The analysis of the translations shows that the translators use different linguistic approaches and styles in their translations, with the older translations being more faithful to the language of the original. The results of the analysis show that Slovene generally has more linguistic and cultural similarities, which also makes the translations more similar to the original, compared to Japanese, where in some cases there are large discrepancies. Nevertheless, the discrepancy between the Slovenian and Japanese translations is relatively small, which shows that, despite the lack of certain linguistic structures, the Japanese language is able to compensate for them with more or less semantically identical equivalents, with occasional shortcomings.
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