What's the joke? For example, being on sabbatical here in
Austria I take the bus to the university every day, about a half
an hour ride from my apartment. At every bus stop they have free
newspapers, OK and Heute, which have sudokus. OK, I’ll fess up.
I’m a sudoku addict. I grab a copy of each and see how much I
can get done on the lurching and bumpy ride to campus. I also
skim through the papers, which are pretty much worth what they
cost, and I read the cartoons. Cartoons are great fodder for the
translation theorist. Heute carries Perscheid, Germany's answer
to Gary Larson. Monday last, they ran this cartoon: Since most
of you don’t speak German, you’d like to know what the joke is.
Well, let’s apply the kinds of principles that most Bible
translations use. If we translate word by word, we get an
understandable English sentence. (We wouldn’t want to change the
meaning by changing the structure.) “Oh my God! I can see no
oil!”Not a joke. Well, you say, the object of a German sentence
attracts the negative,