Interpreting Blue Humour In A Kenyan Political Context
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Date
2018Author
Omondi, Christine Auma
Type
ThesisLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
This study set out to investigate the different forms of blue humour that appear in
politicians’ speeches and the strategies used by interpreters to interpret them. Humour
is a common coping mechanism that is increasingly used over the world. Politicians
are among those who use humour to drive their agenda. Blue humour has gained
popularity among Kenyan politicians and interpreters find themselves in some
situations where they are required to interpret it. Despite the offensive nature of blue
humour, an interpreter ought to effectively render the message to pass across the
intention of the speaker as well as the blue humour, where possible. The study used
relevance theory and adaptation theory to explain how interpreters interpret blue
humour in politicians’ speeches. Relevance theory emphasizes the fact that
interpretation entails more than the decoding of a message. An interpreter must
understand the intention of the speaker. Adaptation theory, on the other hand,
emphasizes the need to understand the context of a speech to render an effective
interpretation. Interpreters were given speeches to interpret and a questionnaire to fill
and the results of the activities were analyzed. From our analysis, blue humour
appears in various forms in politicians’ speeches; Wordplay, double-meaning blue
humour, dark blue humour, insult blue humour, impromptu, slapstick, deadpan, satire
or awkward blue humour. Interpreters use four main strategies to interpret blue
humour; literal translation, summarization, reformulation and paraphrasing. In using
these methods, interpreters add, omit, distort or mistranslate blue humour. We
recommended strategies that could be used and cases where the strategies would be
applicable among other recommendations.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 United StatesUsage Rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/Collections
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