Accidental Humor in Consecutive Interpreting: Accidentally Useful Food for Thought

Abstract

Unlike humor translation, humor in translation, caused by translation errors, is underresearched in translation studies. Accidental humor, as a subgroup of humor, has been analyzed in translation contexts, but to the best knowledge of the author, not in the interpreting context. This descriptive study, being the first of its kind dealing with the accidental humor in consecutive interpreting, is intended to fill the gap in the verbal manifestations of resources in the English-Turkish interpreting context along with the possible reasons for resources of accidental humor in consecutive interpreting class. As a result of the study, a total of 38 accidentally humorous instances are found. The verbal resources are analyzed and divided into main and sub-categories, and for each, examples from the corpus are discussed. In addition, new linguistic resources were discovered, which may be exclusive to this context. The detected items are by no means meant to be exhaustive, as also stated by the former studies, but nevertheless enables greater understanding about the types and possible causes of accidental humor which may occur during the consecutive interpreting process. Given the dearth of literature on accidental humor in consecutive interpreting, this study may provide some insight for remedial teaching/learning in interpreting studies, as well as linguistics. Future studies may examine, among the others, verbal resources in the simultaneous interpreting context and compare the verbal resources in depth in consecutive with those in simultaneous interpreting.