Cross-Language Comedy in Shakespeare: Dirk Delabastita

Cross-language comedy in Shakespeare
DIRK DELABASTITA
Abstract
This paper presents a typology and brief overview of the humorous scenes
in Shakespeare’s plays which derive their comic energy from bilingual
and/or translation-based situations. To begin with, four di¤erent subtypes
of the polyglot pun are distinguished. Two of those turn out to be productive
in Shakespeare’s works. The paper then considers the standard expectations
associated with the ‘‘normal’’ script of interlingual translation and indicates
how in a variety of Shakespearean scenes the breaking of these expectations
contributes to producing e¤ects of comic incongruity.
Keywords: Bilingual pun; employment of translation; false cognate; mala-

propism; polyglot humor; Shakespeare.
This paper brings together the two central concerns of this thematic issue
in what might appear to be a slightly unusual combination. Rather than
discussing the translation of humor (the expected collocation), I shall be
concerned with translation as humor, or as a source of humor. More spe-
cifically, we shall look into the translational use of foreign languages as a
humor-generating mechanism in the plays of Shakespeare. As we shall
see, there is actually a whole range of comic mechanisms depending on
dramatic contexts which involve bilingualism and translation. My theme
may immediately call to mind the well-known comic device of the bilin-
gual pun — which does in e¤ect play a prominent part in our Shakespear-
ean text corpus — but my analysis will highlight several other translation-
related comic techniques as well, which Shakespeare with his unique flair
for humorous e¤ect was quick to capitalize on.
Humor 18–2 (2005), 161–184 0933–1719/05/0018–0161

6 Walter de Gruyter
Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries
Authenticated
Download Date | 6/1/15 7:25 PM
162 D. Delabastita
One of my objectives is to stimulate further research into a widely ne-

glected research domain, namely the fictional representation of language
di¤erence and translation in plays, films, novels, and so on. We are all fa-
miliar with fictional texts in which characters (or groups of characters)
come from di¤erent linguistic and cultural backgrounds in such a way as
to necessitate the textual recourse to di¤erent languages and thus perhaps
to translation. But then, in many other texts linguistic di¤erences between
characters are either avoided from the beginning or suppressed. This last
possibility occurs very often in Shakespeare’s works. For example, Shake-
speare enables the Roman emperor Antony and the Egyptian queen Cleo-
patra to conveniently resort to English and, likewise, most of the dia-
logues involving the French characters in King Henry V and in the King
Henry VI plays are simply conducted in perfectly idiomatic English.
Here, as very often in Shakespeare, interlinguistic di¤erences are known
to exist ‘‘objectively’’ within the fictional world, but they are neutralized
in their dramatic rendering. In a pioneering discussion of language repre-
sentation in fictional texts, Meir Sternberg (1981) calls this the homoge-
nizing convention.
What are the textual conventions, the intended rhetorical e¤ects (hu-
morous or not), the historical circumstances, and/or the ideological back-
grounds that could help us understand why it is that language di¤erence
and translation are foregrounded in some cases, but swept under the fic-
tional rug in others? And when translation is represented in a play (or
film, novel . . .), how is depicted? Does its representation highlight the
uniqueness or specificity of translation concepts and practices in the rele-
vant historical context, or does it rather encourage one to view transla-
tion as a universal category with unchanging features? It would take us
too far afield to try and answer these questions in their full complexity,
but somehow they will have to remain present in the back of our mind.1
1. Polyglot puns
The most obvious way in which bilingual scenes and translation scenes
turn out to possess comic potential is perhaps that they enable polyglot
or multilingual puns to be produced. This happens in a number of Shake-
spearean plays, and especially in King Henry V and The Merry Wives of
Windsor.

Authenticated
Cross-language in Shakespeare 163
Before we consider some of the textual evidence, however, I want to in-

troduce a distinction between four quite di¤erent types of polyglot puns
which to the best of my knowledge has never been acknowledged by the
specialists of wordplay and verbal humor.
Pun experts are traditionally keen to present their own classification of
wordplays and usually the distinctions they insist on making are ex-
tremely subtle and sophisticated, sometimes leading to endless typological
ramifications.2 Yet, despite this widespread taxonomic fervor, most spe-
cialists take the term ‘‘bilingual pun’’ to stand for a single, undi¤erenti-
ated concept. My claim is that we are dealing with four sets of phenom-
ena that have a totally di¤erent semiotic make-up and that should
therefore not be lumped together. My suggestion would be to use polyglot
pun as the umbrella term and to introduce the following subdivisions:
1. bilingual (or multilingual) puns (stricto sensu);
2. translation-based monolingual source-language wordplay;
3. translation-based monolingual target-language wordplay;
4. interference-based monolingual target-language wordplay.
Generally speaking, by wordplay I understand the various textual phe-
nomena (at the level of performance or parole) in which certain features
inherent in the structure of the language(s) used (at the level of compe-
tence or langue) are exploited in such a way as to establish a communica-
tively significant, (near-)simultaneous confrontation of at least two lin-
guistic structures with more or less dissimilar meanings and more or less
similar forms (Delabastita 1993, 1996, 1997).
1.1. Bilingual wordplay
I will reserve the term bilingual (or multilingual ) wordplay for one specific
class of puns, namely for those which throw into contrast two linguistic
expressions which belong to di¤erent languages (usually two, sometimes
more, as in James Joyce’s uncontrollably multilingual Finnegans Wake).
Here is an example culled from John Fowles’ celebrated novel The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969):
(1) a. What was happening was that Sam stood in a fit of the sulks; or
at least with the semblance of it.
‘‘Now what is wrong?’’

Authenticated
164 D. Delabastita
‘‘’Er, sir.’’
‘‘Ursa? Are you speaking Latin now? Never mind, my wit is be-
yond you, you bear. Now I want the truth. Yesterday you were
not prepared to touch the young lady with a bargee’s tool of
trade. Do you deny that?’’ (Fowles 1969: 97; emphasis mine)
This bilingual pun highlights the strong sound similarity and the equally
strong semantic incongruity between the English phrase her, sir (pro-
nounced with an uneducated accent) and the Latin word ursa (articulated
the English way), meaning ‘‘bear’’. The pun is addressed by the novel’s
male protagonist Charles, an erudite member of the Victorian gentry, to
his manservant Sam, whose modest social origins have obviously barred
him from the study of Latin, or indeed from the acquisition of the Queen’s
English. Charles’s joke is contextually pointless and there is no way his
interlocutor would have been able to grasp it. The unkindness of the
joke really backfires on Charles, reflecting the novelist’s covert criticism
of the complicity between the education system and social class in Victo-
rian England, as illustrated by the uneven spread of linguistic skills.
This example reminds us that a full understanding of the bilingual pun
depends on su‰cient knowledge of the foreign language which it presses
into service and also that the adequate knowledge of foreign languages
was (and has remained) a question of educational and thus social privi-
lege. Hence the association of intended bilingual puns such as Charles’s
with pedantry and snobbery.
But bilingual puns may also be produced unintentionally. The acciden-
tal variety of bilingual wordplay typically occurs when the translator (or
the non-native speaker of a language) is snared by a false cognate. Two
examples follow. For the first, I am unable to provide a source; the sec-
ond occurs in the first French translation of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre:
(1) b. Solange, tu es là?

(French mistranslation [meaning ‘‘Solange, are you there?’’] for
German
‘‘Solange du da bist’’ [meaning ‘‘provided you are there’’])
(1) c. J’ai longtemps demeuré avec maman; mais elle est partie pour la
Virginie.
(French mistranslation for ‘‘I lived long ago with mama; but she
is gone to the Holy Virgin’’) (Lesbazeilles-Souvestre 1886: 101;
emphasis mine)

Authenticated
To be sure, in real life, translation howlers of this type cannot usually

count on the amused approval of the translation teacher or of the trans-
lation’s commissioners and users. In that case, they may take on a comic
aspect in the second degree only, i.e. as a quotation, producing an e¤ect
which is very similar to that of the malapropism, with the quoted speaker
comically trying to reach linguistic heights beyond his or her intellectual
capacity.
1.2. Translation-based monolingual source-language wordplay
The puns in the second category of polyglot puns — translation-based

monolingual source-language puns — also require a form of linguistic
border-crossing for them to be triggered into operation, but, unlike
‘‘real’’ bilingual puns, they do not involve a confrontation of formally
similar linguistic expressions from di¤erent languages. A classic example
is:
(2) Peccavi
This ambiguity is attributed to Sir Charles James Napier (1782–1853), the
general who led the British conquest of Sind (in present-day Pakistan).
After winning a major battle in 1843, he is said to have sent this one-
word dispatch which he was sure would be understood at once by his
superiors in London. All they had to do was to back-translate the Latin
‘‘peccavi’’ into its English equivalent ‘‘I have sinned’’ to reveal the under-
lying homophonous phrase ‘‘I have Sind’’, which was the real message he
wanted to put across.
The anecdote is a famous one. It is recorded in the Encyclopaedia Bri-
tannica and was given pride of place in an internet anthology of bilingual
puns (Lederer 2000: 5). However, I contend that it really presents a
monolingual pun and not a bilingual one, or at least not in the same
way as those just discussed. Indeed, the two form-meaning discrepancies
that linguistically support the pun — the phonetic coincidence of Sind and
sinned and the polysemy of have as either a lexical verb or an auxiliary —
are both facts of one language only, namely English.
The Latin translation of I have sinned / I have Sind serves basically to
select one of the two readings of the initial, monolingual, source-language
ambiguity. Contextually and situationally, the selected reading happens
to be totally inappropriate, for why on earth would an army general

Authenticated
166 D. Delabastita
want to cable a confession of his moral imperfection? This incongruity

acts as a cue, sending the text receivers looking for an ulterior meaning.
In this way, the pun’s double meaning is simultaneously hidden from the
view of those who do not know both English and Latin, and revealed to
those who do. But beyond the operation of this clever coding mechanism,
the presence of Latin is really external to the ambiguity itself. Indeed, in
principle a translation into (say) French ( j’ai péché) might have done the
trick just as well as the Latin version, provided the General and his ad-
dressees were su‰ciently familiar with the language of Voltaire.
1.3. Translation-based monolingual target-language wordplay
Like the previous group of polyglot puns, the third group — translation-
based monolingual target-language puns — also involves an act of transla-
tion while really resulting from a clash of forms and meanings within one
and the same language. However, in contradistinction to the peccavi case
just explained, the linguistic focus of the ambiguities discussed here is to
be found immediately in the resulting target text and does not need to be
looked for in an underlying text to be retrieved through back-translation.
Here is an example of such a pun (found in an anonymous document con-
taining more such examples and which seems to have been circulated
quite widely):
(3) In a Bucharest hotel lobby: ‘‘The lift is being fixed for the next day.
During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.’’ (emphasis
mine)
This notice involuntarily and comically insults hotel guests, both subvert-
ing its author’s presumed intentions and flouting the hotel code of hospi-
tality and courtesy. The joke pretends to be an authentic English phrase
produced by a Rumanian hotel employee who allegedly translated it liter-
ally out of his native tongue. The humor of it finds its ultimate linguistic
origin in the polysemy of the verb to bear, meaning either ‘‘tolerate, put
up with, endure’’ or ‘‘carry, take, transport’’. The fact that normally only
the first sense is possible in the adjectival derivation unbearable confirms
both the phrase’s origin as a translation and the translator’s insu‰cient
command of the English language. It is important to note that the linguis-
tic basis of this ambiguity only belongs to the target language (English)
of the translation act that is being stage-managed. Knowledge of the

Authenticated
presumed source language (here: Rumanian) is not at all required for

the joke to function. This is radically di¤erent from the ‘‘peccavi’’ exam-
ple, where back-translation to the original was necessary to reveal the
ambiguity.
Thus, the role of bilingualism and translation is very restricted here. It
is merely to naturalize the joke by creating a ‘‘realistic’’ situational frame
for it. It is the assumption of inadequate (e.g., literal) translation which
rationalizes the ungrammaticality or inappropriateness of the utterance
and thereby prepares the way for the realization of the English ambiguity.
But whether the phrase really resulted from translation out of Rumanian,
is doubtful and eventually of little interest. What matters is the presup-
position of linguistic interference between source language and target
language.
1.4. Interference-based monolingual target-language wordplay
Interference between languages may also occur below the morphemic

level, for instance in the area of phonetic realization. A well-known group
of jokes depend on phonemic features or articulatory habits being carried
over from one language into another and serving to rationalize the comic
pun. The following is a classic, if not overworked example:
(4) American first lady: ‘‘When do you have elections?’’
Japanese ambassador (visibly embarrassed): ‘‘Before bleakfast.’’
It is the inability of Japanese speakers to distinguish between [l] and
[r] which provides the (pseudo-)realistic pretext and context for this mis-
understanding. I would suggest calling this an interference-based (rather
than translation-based) monolingual target-language pun. The unfortunate
Japanese diplomat in the joke is speaking what is to him a foreign lan-
guage (hence ‘‘target language’’), yet no real act of translation seems
to be presupposed insofar as the ambassador may be assumed to speak
English ‘‘directly’’ and quite idiomatically. Another di¤erence with the
previous category is that some knowledge on the receiver’s part of the
speaker’s native tongue (the ‘‘source language’’ in the sense of it being
the source of the phonemic interference) helps to give the joke rhetorical
conviction. It is indeed common linguistic knowledge — with perceptions
actually being of greater importance here than the hard linguistic facts —
that Japanese speakers easily confuse [l] and [r]. Similarly, many of the

Authenticated
168 D. Delabastita
interference-based jokes in the British sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo depend on the

widespread perception that German speakers of English tend to struggle
with the distinction between the sounds [th] and [s]. In such cases, it
makes a di¤erence if the speaker is Japanese, German, or some other na-
tionality. Needless to say, such a recourse to shibboleths, being part of a
policy of nationality-based linguistic stereotyping, may also be important
for reasons other than the linguistic plausibility of the pun. For example,
it may enable the joker to tap ethnically based sources of humor.
2. Shakespearean examples
Of the four types of polyglot wordplay we have distinguished, only

the first and the last are fairly well represented in Shakespeare’s
works: the bilingual puns and the interference-based monolingual target-
language puns. Of the translation-based monolingual target-language
wordplay, I have not been able to find a single convincing example. Of
the translation-based monolingual source-language type of wordplay, I
spotted one instance only. In scene 5.4 of the romance Cymbeline, the
character Posthumus Leonatus finds the following mysterious message:
(5) [Reads] ‘‘When as a lion’s whelp shall, to himself unknown, without

seeking find, and be embrac’d by a piece of tender air [ . . . ], then
shall Posthumus end his miseries, Britain be fortunate, and flourish
in peace and plenty’’. (Cymbeline 5.4.138–144) (emphasis mine).3
A soothsayer soon unravels this riddling prophecy in the play’s conclu-

sion. It appears that double translation from English to Latin provides
the key to unlock it. That ‘‘lion’s whelp’’ refers to Leonatus may be obvi-
ous to many, but the other key phrase, ‘‘tender air’’, is ciphered in a more
elaborate and less transparent manner: in Latin, ‘‘tender air’’ may be ren-
dered as ‘‘mollis aer’’ and through sound association — in fact, through
a kind of pseudo-etymological Latin pun — this becomes mulier (Latin
‘‘woman’’). The upshot is that the play has a happy ending, with Posthu-
mus ‘‘embrac’d’’ by and reconciled with his wife (his mulier, his mollis
aer, his piece of ‘‘tender air’’). The semiotic structure of this pun, which
involves coding through the deceptive use of a covert and selective trans-
lation of a source-language ambiguity, is perfectly identical to that of the
peccavi pun. Compare:

Authenticated
LATIN (TL)
peccavi
↑
selective translation
↑
I have sinned ← I have Sind
ENGLISH (SL)
monolingual source-language pun
ENGLISH (TL)
tender air
↑
selective translation
↑
mollis aer ← mulier
LATIN (SL)
monolingual source-language pun
Figure 1. Semiotic structure of translation-based monolingual source-language pun

Authenticated
170 D. Delabastita
But the case of this pun, interesting as it is, remains a rarity in Shake-
speare’s plays and, in terms of rhetorical e¤ect, it could hardly be called
a comic one. The category of bilingual puns (as defined above) and that
of interference-based puns provide many more Shakespearean examples
and their comic momentum is a lot stronger.
We shall now look at a sample of them, but we should perhaps com-
mence by briefly acknowledging the fact that authors of Shakespeare’s
calibre have a way of undermining the scholar’s neat distinctions. The fol-
lowing is a polyglot pun which somehow refuses to fit into the fourfold
classification presented above. It appears to be doubly monolingual with-
out however being bilingual:
(6) DROMIO OF EPHESUS: Mistress, respice finem, respect your end,

or rather, to prophesy like the parrot, beware the rope’s end. (The
Comedy of Errors 4.4.43–45)
The humorous e¤ect here depends largely on the sound similarity and
suggested etymological link between (Latin) respice and (English) re-
spect, which produces a kind of bilingual wordplay as defined above.
But the passage shows interesting further complications. Respice finem
(‘‘remember [the, your] end’’) was a pious proverb (comparable to me-
mento mori), which was sometimes taught to parrots and which was also
sometimes punningly modified into the phrase respice funem (Latin ‘‘re-
member the rope’’, i.e., the hangman’s rope). There is a Latin pun here
which hinges on sound ( finem [‘‘end’’] versus funem [‘‘rope’’]). It is
matched by an English pun which is near-synonymous but which is for-
mally di¤erent insofar as it depends on meaning more than sound (more
precisely, it mobilizes the lexical polysemy of ‘‘end’’, meaning either
‘‘death’’ or ‘‘extremity of something long and narrow’’, with the noose
being at the end of the executioner’s rope). Be that as it may, finem does
not itself enter directly into a punning liaison with end and neither does
funem with rope’s end. Hence this case falls outside our definition of
the bilingual pun stricto sensu. Rather, it is a curious instance of mono-
lingual English and Latin wordplays presenting cross-language equiva-
lence as puns and thus directly challenging the cliché that puns do not
translate:

Authenticated
respect your end beware the rope’s end

ENGLISH PUN
(textually present) (textually present)
corresponding with
respice finem respice funem

LATIN PUN
(textually present) (implied)
Figure 2. Semiotic structure of Dromio’s pun (Errors 4 (4), 43–45)
Let us now look at some examples of Shakespearean bilingual wordplay.

In the following scene from King Henry V, the braggart soldier Pistol has
just captured a cowardly French soldier:
(7) a. PISTOL: Yield, cur!
FRENCH SOLDIER: Je pense que vous êtes le gentilhomme de
bonne qualité.
PISTOL: Qualité? ‘‘Caleno custore me’’!
Art thou a gentleman? What is thy name? Discuss.
FRENCH SOLDIER: O Seigneur Dieu!
PISTOL: O Signieur Dew should be a gentleman. [ . . . ]
FRENCH SOLDIER: O prenez miséricorde! Ayez pitié de moi!
PISTOL: Moy shall not serve, I will have forty moys,
Or I will fetch thy rim out at thy throat
In drops of crimson blood.
FRENCH SOLDIER: Est-il impossible d’échapper la force de
ton bras?
PISTOL: Brass, cur?
Thou damned and luxurious mountain goat,
O¤er’st me brass? (King Henry V 4.4.1–19)
The combination of Pistol’s greed and his ignorance of French produces a
whole sequence of bilingual puns:

Authenticated
172 D. Delabastita
– French qualité (‘‘quality’’, ‘‘distinction’’) reminds Pistol of an equally

obscure and cacophonous snatch from an Irish song (caleno custore
me);
– Seigneur Dieu (in French a desperate exclamation addressed to God)
is misunderstood both semantically and pragmatically as Signieur Dew
(‘‘lord Dew’’), i.e. as the prisoner’s name, supposedly given in reply to
Pistol’s command that the man should identify himself;
– moi (French personal pronoun ‘‘me’’) becomes moy (the imagined
name of a coin);
– bras (French ‘‘arm’’) becomes English brass.
In another famous translation-scene from the same play, the French Prin-
cess Katherine uses translation as a method to learn the English words for
the various parts of the body. Here is a short sample.
(7) b. KATHERINE: Comment appelez-vous le col?

ALICE: De nick, madame.
KATHERINE: De nick. Et le menton?
ALICE: De chin.
KATHERINE: De sin. Le col, de nick; le menton, de sin. [ . . . ]
Comment appelez-vous le pied et la robe?
ALICE: De foot, madame, et de coun.
KATHERINE: De foot, et de coun? O Seigneur Dieu, ils sont
les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non
pour les dames d’honneur d’user. [ . . . ] Foh! De foot et de coun!
(King Henry V 3.4.29–51)
Katherine’s teacher is her attendant Alice, whose English is hardly better

than that of her royal pupil. Humorous phonetic interference between
French and English is found throughout the dialogue, but the two bawdy
polyglot puns that present the scene’s comic climax are bilingual puns in
the strictest sense of the term. They throw into contrast innocent English
household words with similar-sounding French taboo words: foot be-
comes foutre; gown becomes con. Comparable comic bilingual puns occur
in the Latin lesson in The Merry Wives of Windsor (beginning of act 4).
The same plays — King Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor —
also supply the clearest Shakespearean examples of interference-
based monolingual target-language wordplay. Both plays stage several
characters who speak English as a foreign language and thereby display

Authenticated
various degrees of linguistic imperfection or even ineptitude. These charac-

ters include French individuals (for instance, Katherine and Alice, as in the
fragment above, or Dr Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor), but also
various nationals from the Celtic fringe: Fluellen (the Welshman), Mac-
morris (the Irishman) and Jamy (the Scot) in King Henry V, as well as the
Welsh parson Sir Hugh Evans in The Merry Wives of Windsor. The prove-
nance of these characters strongly marks their use of English, which
produces a funny e¤ect quite by itself, but in addition, there are several
instances where Shakespeare exploits the phonemic interference for the
sake of a pun. Here are two textual examples:
(8) a. EVANS: If there is one, I shall make two in the company.

CAIUS: If dere be one, or two, I shall make-a de turd. (The
Merry Wives of Windsor 3.3.219–220)
This is a monolingual English joke (‘‘third’’ versus ‘‘turd’’), which is en-

abled by cross-lingual interference between French and English phonol-
ogy; more specifically, by the di‰culty that French speakers of English
have to distinguish clearly between the English [th] fricatives and the plo-
sives [d] (voiced) or [t] (voiceless). Also with respect to voicing, one of the
main stumbling blocks for Welsh speakers of English was apparently the
voicing of plosives, as may be shown by my second example:
(8) b. GOWER: [ . . . ] O, ’tis a gallant king!

FLUELLEN: Ay, he was porn at Monmouth, Captain Gower.
What call you the town’s name where Alexander the Pig was
born? (King Henry V 4.7.10–13)
While Fluellen’s ignorance underlies the substitution of ‘‘Alexander the

Big’’ for ‘‘Alexander the Great’’, it is his Welsh origin which accounts
for the shift from ‘‘big’’ to ‘‘pig’’. Needless to say, the joke’s association
of the two errors does little to make us view Welshmen as either well edu-
cated or intelligent.
3. Semantics and politics
So far, we have looked at a variety of polyglot puns from the viewpoint

of their underlying linguistic — or interlinguistic — mechanisms and we
have not directly tackled the question of why these polyglot puns, or at

Authenticated
174 D. Delabastita
least most of them, are humorous. A full answer to this question would
require a detailed consideration of texts and contexts, for which there is
no su‰cient space here, but a number of basic mechanisms may be
pointed out.
By definition, puns bring about a semantic contrast between linguistic
meanings that have an identical or near-identical linguistic expression.
Through those di¤erent meanings, conflicting ‘‘scripts’’ or situational
‘‘frames’’, and even di¤erent ideologies and value systems may be acti-
vated. The factor of cognitive incongruity may therefore be assumed to
play a significant role in the production and reception of humorous poly-
glot puns. Interestingly, in the case of bilingual puns, this incongruity is
commensurate with the absence of translational equivalence. For exam-
ple, the degree of non-equivalence characterising Pistol’s horrible transla-
tion errors — e.g. English ‘‘brass’’ for French ‘‘bras’’ — is not only the
cause of humorous cognitive incongruity, but it could also be said to
mark the precise extent of it. In bilingual puns, cognitive incongruity is
inversely proportionate to translational equivalence.
But pleasurable feelings conducive to humor, or constitutive of it, may
also (and usually do) come from other sources than sheer cognitive incon-
gruity. Consider, for example, the following factors:
– the gratification of knowing that we belong to an in-group of under-
standing people, which we experience when we solve a riddle requiring
considerable processing e¤ort and linguistic skill;
– the Schadenfreude-like, morally dubious reassurance derived from
seeing other mortals stumble or blunder when they venture into less
familiar linguistic territory;
– the agreeable sensation released by the transgression of social taboos
on sexuality or aggression under the cover of socially acceptable fore-
pleasure;
– the comfort of knowing that one safely belongs to a social group (e.g.,
an ethnic group, a nation) that knows itself (i.e., believes itself ) to be
superior to certain outsiders.
This last factor seems to be of great historical interest in the case of
Shakespeare’s polyglot humor. As we all know, language is a means of
identity-building and community-building as much as of communication.
Using a certain language, or using it in a certain way, will place you in-
side (or outside) a social group and earn you (or lose you) a position of
strength and status. With Shakespeare living at a time when England

Authenticated
was in the process of establishing itself as a nation state with dominance

over the neighboring Celtic territories and in a situation of rivalry with
continental nations such as France, his use of the polyglot pun was hardly
likely to be ideologically neutral or innocuous. A character’s incorrect use
of English in Shakespeare may thus become a mark of di¤erence, suggest-
ing ludicrous inferiority, while simultaneously and subtly posing an im-
plicit threat as well. The spectacle of a Welshman speaking English pro-
vided evidence that the process of colonial integration (or submission)
was well underway; indeed, that the process was inevitable. But then, the
Welshman’s foreign accent and his comic linguistic errors would also
have bespoken lingering otherness and thus the potential danger of a re-
lapse into anti-English subversion and Celtic barbarity.4
4. Semantics and pragmatics
Let us now turn to a rather di¤erent set of comic translation scenes from
Shakespeare. They are scenes in which the recourse to foreign languages
and translation does not — or not primarily — serve to generate word-
play. The following examples all involve some sort of cognitive incongru-
ity, but not the type of incongruity that is typically sparked o¤ by the
polyglot pun. What is at stake in them is not so much the semantics of
translation (e.g., issues of grammaticality, semantic normality and trans-
lation equivalence), but rather the pragmatics of translation. The humor-
generating incongruity in the following examples does not in the first
place concern the correctness of the cross-linguistic speech-act, but the
preliminary conditions under which this speech-act takes place, or which
may indeed prevent it from taking place. In other words, a number of
pragmatic rules associated with the ‘‘normal’’ translation script are not
fulfilled, thus creating a clash between what happens in the dramatic
scene under the name of translation and the spectators’ expectations of
what translation really ‘‘is’’ or ‘‘should be’’.
Rather than presenting the relevant scenes in a random sequence, I
shall try to relate them to a list of what may be regarded as specific ex-
pectations normally associated with translation. Thus, for a translation
act to function successfully, we automatically assume that the following
five enabling factors should all be present:
1. an awareness that translation is either taking place or being called
for; i.e. a correct understanding and application of the distinction

Authenticated
176 D. Delabastita
between native tongue and foreign language, as well as between

translated and untranslated discourse;
2. a correct identification of the pair of languages involved in the com-
municative situation;
3. a communicative situation which requires and justifies the recourse to
translation: for example, a communication gap between the interloc-
utors resulting from the absence of a shared language, or the use of
translation as a foreign-language teaching method;
4. the translator’s loyalty to both the source-text author and the recipi-
ent of the translation, involving a willingness to carry out the transla-
tion task in accordance with the current norms of correctness and
fidelity;
5. su‰cient intelligence and language skills enabling the translator to fill
the functional needs posed by the translation context and to achieve
the ideal of loyalty.
This list could be further theorized in many di¤erent ways, but it may
serve as a convenient summary of the common-sense notion of transla-
tion which prevailed in Shakespeare’s time (and which still seems valid
today). For each of the five constituents of this ‘‘standard’’ or ‘‘normal’’
translation ‘‘script’’, we can find one or more Shakespearean examples —
either short comic moments or more elaborate scenes — where our ex-
pectations are thwarted in such a way as to raise a smile or get a laugh.
Let us now revisit them separately and quote a relevant example.
4.1. Translation or not?
Translation is unthinkable without a correct understanding and applica-

tion of the distinction between native tongue and foreign language and
thus between translated and untranslated discourse. In the first example,
Costard, the Clown in Love’s Labour’s Lost, sees translation where there
is none. His ignorance prompts him to see any polysyllabic English word
as a Latin word, even where this involves an anachronism (a Latin word
for an English coin); his assumption that Latin has specific words for spe-
cific amounts of English money bespeaks an unusually literalist frame of
mind and a glaring incapacity to make mental abstractions:
(9) ARMADO: There is remuneration, [Gives Costard a coin] for the
best ward of mine honour is rewarding my dependents. [ . . . ]

Authenticated
COSTARD: Now will I look to this remuneration. ‘‘Remu-

neration’’? O that’s the Latin word for three farthings. Three
farthings — remuneration. [ . . . ] (Love’s Labour’s Lost 3.1.130–137)
In the second example (from The Merry Wives of Windsor), the school-
boy William during his Latin lesson fails or refuses to provide a trans-
lation when it is called for. In terms of Roman Jakobson’s famous dis-
tinction between intralingual translation, interlingual translation and
intersemiotic translation, he provides an intralingual one (i.e., a para-
phrase or synonym in the same language) rather than the interlingual
translation (translation ‘‘proper’’) that his teacher is expecting of him.
Somewhat like Costard in the previous example, he displays a literalist at-
titude making it hard for him to make sense of things beyond the referen-
tial immediacy of the empirical world surrounding him:
(10) EVANS: [ . . . ] What is lapis, William?
WILLIAM: A stone.
EVANS: And what is ‘‘a stone’’, William?
WILLIAM: A pebble.
EVANS: No, it is lapis; I pray you remember in your prain. (The
Merry Wives of Windsor 4.1.27–31)
4.2. Identification of source and target languages
In the following instance, a Shakespearean character comically fails

to deliver on the requirement of the correct identification of the pair of
languages involved in the communicative situation: Petruchio’s jocular
servant Grumio in The Taming of the Shrew pretends to hear Latin for
Italian:
(11) PETRUCHIO: Signor Hortensio, come you to part the fray?

Con tutto il cuore ben trovato, may I say.
HORTENSIO: Alla nostra casa ben venuto, molto honorato signor
mio Petrucio.
Rise, Grumio, rise, we will compound this quarrel.
GRUMIO: Nay, ’tis no matter, sir, what he ’leges in Latin. [ . . . ]
(The Taming of the Shrew 1.2.23–28)
It is worth noting that this joke works reasonably well for an English au-
dience (for whom Italian and Latin are both ‘‘exotic’’ languages) but is

Authenticated
178 D. Delabastita
bound to ba¿e an Italian audience, since, the play being set in Italy, how
could an Italian character fail to tell Italian from Latin?
4.3. Functional need
Translation requires a raison d’être, i.e. a communicative justification or

functional need of some sort. In most cases this need is created by the
presence of a communication gap between interlocutors who do not share
a common language. Another typical situation is the recourse to transla-
tion as a teaching method to acquire, practice or test the knowledge of a
foreign tongue. However, no such justification may be found in the fol-
lowing case:
(12) HOLOFERNES: The deer was, as you know, sanguis, in blood,

ripe as the pomewater, who now hangeth like a jewel in the ear of
caelo, the sky, the welkin, the heaven, and anon falleth like a crab
on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth.
NATHANIEL: Truly, Master Holofernes, the epithets are sweetly
varied, like a scholar at the least [ . . . ] (Love’s Labour’s Lost 4.2.3–
11)
Holofernes’s translations, with their overkill load of stylistic variants,

may be philologically correct and reveal an impressive copia verborum,
but, pragmatically speaking, they are totally inappropriate. The school-
master’s pedagogical and rhetorical use of translation is wholly out of
context here, fatally bringing the vanity, artificiality and pedantry of his
humanistic learning into the firing line of Shakespeare’s satirical humor.
The same precondition — functional need for translation — is flouted in
a di¤erent way in the double translation scene in act four of All’s Well
That Ends Well. In order to unmask Parolles and to show him for the
coward that he is, the Lords disguise as foreign soldiers and capture him,
speaking an invented strange gibberish, with one of them (the first soldier)
pretending to serve as an interpreter:
(13) a. 1 SOLDIER: Boskos vauvado. I understand thee, and can

speak thy tongue. Kerelybonto. Sir, betake thee to thy faith, for
seventeen poniards are at thy bosom.
PAROLLES: O!
1 SOLDIER: O, pray, pray, pray! Manka revania dulche.

Authenticated
1 LORD: Oscorbidulchos volivorco.

1 SOLDIER: The general is content to spare thee yet,
And, hoodwink’d as thou art, will lead thee on
To gather from thee. Haply thou may’st inform
Something to save thy life. [ . . . ] (All’s Well That Ends Well
4.1.74–83)
The questioning itself takes place in scene 4.3, where, interestingly,
Shakespeare soon abandons the Lords’ mumbo jumbo.
(13) b. PAROLLES: I will confess what I know without constraint. If
ye pinch me like a pasty I can say no more.
1 SOLDIER: Bosko chimurcho.
1 LORD: Boblibindo chicurmurco.
1 SOLDIER: You are a merciful general. Our general bids you
answer to what I shall ask you out of a note. (4.3.120–126)
From this point onwards, the interview is conducted entirely in English,

with the interpreter ‘‘translating’’ the general’s questions directly o¤ a
paper.
(13) c. 1 SOLDIER: [Reads.] First, demand of him, how many horse
the duke is strong. What say you to that? (4.3.128–129)
In this way, the questioning goes on for another two-hundred lines. It is

interesting to observe that, after exploiting the comic potential of the
Lords’ jabberwocky and its nonsensical interpreting for as far as it would
go, Shakespeare understood that a less overt and more economical mode
of linguistic mediation was needed to keep up the scene’s dramatic pace.
4.4. Loyalty
The translator is expected to be loyal to both the source-text author and

the recipient of the translation, showing a willingness to carry out the
translation task in accordance with the current norms of correctness and
fidelity. Such a concern with translational loyalty is very far indeed from
the intentions of Lucentio in act three of The Taming of the Shrew.
Lucentio poses as a Latin teacher to Bianca and translates an Ovidian
excerpt for her with a level of interpretive freedom which altogether sac-
rifices philological scruple to erotic ambition:

Authenticated
180 D. Delabastita
(14) a. LUCENTIO: Hic ibat, as I told you before — Simois, I am

Lucentio — hic est, son unto Vincentio of Pisa — Sigeia tellus,
disguised thus to get your love — Hic steterat, and that Lucen-
tio that comes a wooing — Priami, is my man Tranio — regia,
bearing my port — celsa senis, that we might beguile the old
pantaloon. (The Taming of the Shrew 3.1.31–36)
Lucentio’s pupil Bianca goes on to answer him with an alternative trans-

lation of the same lines (‘‘Now let me see if I can construe it’’) which seg-
ments the Latin original into totally di¤erent translation units, but which
ends up owing just as little to Ovid:
(14) b. BIANCA: Hic ibat Simois, I know you not — hic est Sigeia tel-
lus, I trust you not — Hic steterat Priami, take heed he hear us
not — regia, presume not — celsa senis, despair not. (3.1.41–43)
4.5. Su‰cient skills
In order to fill the functional needs posed by the translation context and
to achieve the ideal of loyalty, the translator must possess su‰cient intel-
ligence and skills. Several examples of non-compliance with this require-
ment were already adduced in the first part of this essay. Indeed, most
Shakespearean instances of polyglot punning — recall the bilingual puns
(e.g., Pistol) and the interference-based monolingual target-language
wordplay (e.g., Dr Caius) — were produced inadvertently within the fic-
tional world, comically exposing their speaker’s lack of interlinguistic
skills.
Other examples may be found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (see
also Wells 1999). The ‘‘rude mechanicals’’ (the unlettered working-men)
have decided to perform a play to celebrate the royal wedding of Theseus
and Hippolyta. The rehearsal takes place in act 3, the performance in
act 5. The play is ‘‘Pyramus and Thisby’’, a translation-cum-theatrical-
adaptation of a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text which in the
Elizabethan period was widely circulating both in the Latin original and
in English. The actors make a delightfully comic mess of Ovid’s story, as
may be illustrated by the following excerpt from the rehearsals:
(15) QUINCE: Come, sit down every mother’s son, and rehearse your
parts. Pyramus, you begin. When you have spoken your speech,

Authenticated
enter into that brake; and so every one according to his cue. [ . . . ]
Speak, Pyramus; Thisby stand forth.
BOTTOM [PYRAMUS]: Thisby, the flowers of odious savours
sweet —
QUINCE: ‘‘Odorous’’! ‘‘odorous’’!
BOTTOM [PYRAMUS]: — odorous savours sweet;
So hath thy breath, my dearest Thisbe dear.
But hark, a voice! Stay thou but here awhile,
And by and by I will to thee appear. [EXIT]
[...]
FLUTE [THISBY]: Must I speak now?
QUINCE: Ay, marry, must you; for you must understand he goes
but to see a noise that he heard, and is to come again.
FLUTE [THISBY]: Most radiant Pyramus, most lily-white of hue,
Of colour like the red rose on triumphant briar,
Most brisky juvenal, and eke most lovely Jew,
As true as truest horse that yet would never tire;
I’ll meet thee, Pyramus, at Ninny’s tomb.
QUINCE: ‘‘Ninus’ tomb’’, man! Why, you must not speak that
yet; that you answer to Pyramus. You speak all your part at once,
cues and all. Pyramus, enter! Your cue is past; it is ‘‘never tire’’.
FLUTE [THISBY]: O — As true as truest horse that yet would
never tire. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 3.1.68–96)
As we know, Bottom/Pyramus does not miss his cue a second time and
duly enters now, albeit not quite being himself, but wearing a donkey’s
head (having been bewitched by Puck), which triggers Quince’s often
quoted phrase:
QUINCE: Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee! Thou art translated!
(3.1.112–113)
There is a double translation process going on in this scene: from Ovid’s
Latin to the craftsmen’s English (interlingual translation) and from the
written narrative to the performance text (intersemiotic translation). The
workmen fail miserably but humorously in either, indeed making both
Ovid and themselves look rather like donkeys. With respect to the inter-
lingual dimension, the text is a parody of incompetent translation with
its trite images (‘‘true as truest horse’’), contradictions (‘‘most lily-white
. . . like the red rose’’), silly rhymes resulting from poetic necessity
(‘‘most lovely Jew’’), awkward combinations of archaisms (‘‘eke’’) and

Authenticated
182 D. Delabastita
neologisms (‘‘juvenal’’), and so on. Not surprisingly, the author or per-

former of this simulated translation falls into the trap of an involuntary
bilingual pun. This happens where he gives ‘‘Ninny’s tomb’’ for ‘‘Ninus’
tomb’’ in line 3.1.92. As was recently argued by Margaret Tudeau-
Clayton (2002: 11), the silly translation mistake ‘‘Ninny’’ (meaning
‘‘fool’’) really found its origin in a false friend, as Ovid’s text has in the
corresponding passage ‘‘Nini’’, the Latin genitive singular form of
‘‘Ninus’’.
5. Final remark
One of several intriguing questions that have had to remain unasked here
is how could or should bilingual and translation-based humor itself
be dealt with in translation? How to translate translation-based comic
scenes? The range of dramatic situations and linguistic mechanisms we
have exemplified is so wide that no straightforward answer to that ques-
tion may be envisaged.
Some of them appear to pose no serious technical obstacles to the
translator. For example, translating the nonsensical proto-esperanto
which Shakespeare invented for All’s Well That Ends Well (examples
[13a], [13b], [13c] above) seems to present no di‰culties at all. If the
translator renders the English into his/her target language while simply
leaving the Lords’ gibberish intact, the comic force of the relevant scenes
will lose none of its impact. But then, di‰culties may turn up where they
are least expected. Thus, Shakespeare’s coinages in those scenes somehow
sound much more familiar and indeed at some points more meaningful
to Italian or Spanish spectators/readers than they would have done to
Shakespeare’s original audience. Therefore, if one translates the play
into one of the Romance languages, one might do well not to treat the
Lords’ presumed native tongue as mere inert linguistic matter — not need-
ing translation, and thus not to be tampered with — but rather to consider
editing or rewriting it in an e¤ort to recreate the original’s impression of
exotic nonsense just below the threshold of meaningfulness.
At the other end of the scale of interlinguistic feasibility, one may be
inclined to situate Shakespeare’s bilingual puns, which seem to defy trans-
lation altogether. If monolingual puns are often held to be untranslatable
(or at least to put the resourcefulness of translators to the severest of all
tests), this may be believed to be true a fortiori for bilingual puns. For ex-
ample, how does one render the French/English jokes in King Henry V

Authenticated
(examples [7a]–[7b])? And how to negotiate the situation if one happens

to be translating the play into French? As I have demonstrated in a recent
discussion of the French translations of King Henry V (Delabastita 2002),
the range of often contradictory constraints involved here is truly mind-
boggling.
Clearly, the translatability of Shakespeare’s bilingual or translation-
based scenes is too vast a subject to be discussed here. What should be
clear, however, is that it should be understood as a cline — and not as an
either/or proposition, let alone as a quasi-philosophical issue — and that
the position of individual comic moments along this cline of translatabil-
ity depends on many factors, including the bilingual scene’s linguistic and
semiotic structure as analyzed in the above considerations.
University of Namur
Notes
Correspondence address: dirk.delabastita@fundp.ac.be

1. Some of these issues are discussed in a forthcoming essay (Delabastita 2004) which
examines the representation of translation in Shakespeare’s works without focusing
specifically on comic scenes and which also includes further references to the relevant
secondary literature within Shakespeare studies.
2. For a further exploration of this distinction, for more examples and for a more detailed
list of references, see my ‘‘Aspects of interlingual ambiguity: polyglot punning’’ (Dela-
bastita 2001).
3. All Shakespearean quotations are from the Arden edition of Shakespeare’s Complete
Works (Proudfoot et al. 2001).
4. Shakespearean critics have recently devoted much attention to the politics of nation-
hood in Elizabethan England as a necessary background for an understanding of Shake-
speare’s uses of linguistic variation. See, amongst others, Neill 1994; Cronin 1997; and
Hawkes 1997. It is worth mentioning that critical perspectives on these issues have also
been informed by gender studies; see, for example, Ostovich (1994).
References
Brontë, Charlotte
2000 Jane Eyre. Smith, Margaret (ed.). Oxford/New York: Oxford University
Press.
Cronin, Michael
1997 Rug-headed kerns speaking tongues: Shakespeare, translation and the Irish
language. In Burnett, Mark Thornton, and Ramona Wray (eds.), Shake-
speare and Ireland. History, Politics, Culture. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 193–
212.

Authenticated
184 D. Delabastita
Delabastita, Dirk
1993 There’s a Double Tongue. An Investigation into the Translation of Shake-
speare’s Wordplay. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi.
2001 Aspects of interlingual ambiguity: Polyglot punning. In Bogaards, Paul,
Johan Rooryck, and Paul J. Smith (eds.), Quitte ou Double Sens. Articles sur
l’ambiguı̈té o¤erts à Ronald Landheer. Amsterdam/Atlanta: Rodopi, 45–64.
2002 A great feast of languages. Shakespeare’s multilingual comedy in King
Henry V and the translator. The Translator 8 (2), 303–340. Special issue:
Translating humor, Vandaele, Jeroen (ed.).
2004 ‘‘If I know the letters and the language’’. Translation as a dramatic device
in Shakespeare’s plays. In Hoenselaars, Ton (ed.), Shakespeare and the
Language of Translation (Arden Shakespeare: Shakespeare and Language
Series). London: Thomson Learning, 31–52.
1996 (ed.) The Translator 2 (2). Special issue: Wordplay and translation.
1997 (ed.) Traductio. Essays on Punning and Translation. Manchester: St Jerome/
Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur.
Fowles, John
1969 The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Jonathan Cape.
Hawkes, Terence
1997 Bryn glas. European Journal of English Studies 1 (3), 269–290.
Lederer, Richard
2000 Bilingual puns. http://www.salon.com.weekly/verb960722.html.
Lesbazeilles-Souvestre
1886 Jane Eyre ou les mémoires d’une institutrice. Paris: Hachette.
(trans.)
Neill, Michael
1994 Broken English and broken Irish: Nation, language, and the optic of power
in Shakespeare’s histories. Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1), 1–32.
Ostovich, Helen
1994 ‘‘Teach you our princess English?’’ Equivocal translation of the French in
Henry V. In Trexler, R. C. (ed.), Gender Rhetorics: Postures of Dominance
and Submission in History. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance
Texts and Studies, 147–161.
Proudfoot, Richard, Ann Thompson, and David Scott Kastan (eds.)
2001 The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works, revised ed. London: Thomson
Learning.
Sternberg, Meir
1981 Polylingualism as reality and translation as mimesis. Poetics Today 2 (4),
221–239.
Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret
2002 Scenes of translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet, and A
Midsummer Night’s Dream. Translation and Literature 11 (1), 1–23.
Wells, Stanley
1999 Translations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In Chew, Shirley, and Alistair
Stead (eds.), Translating Life. Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics. Liver-
pool: Liverpool University Press, 15–32.

Authenticated

Cross-Language Comedy in Shakespeare: Dirk Delabastita

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cross-Language Comedy in Shakespeare: Dirk Delabastita

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Cross-language comedy in Shakespeare

Keywords: Bilingual pun; employment of translation; false cognate; mala-

Humor 18–2 (2005), 161–184 0933–1719/05/0018–0161

One of my objectives is to stimulate further research into a widely ne-

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

Before we consider some of the textual evidence, however, I want to in-

1.1. Bilingual wordplay

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

(1) b. Solange, tu es là?

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

To be sure, in real life, translation howlers of this type cannot usually

1.2. Translation-based monolingual source-language wordplay

The puns in the second category of polyglot puns — translation-based

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

want to cable a confession of his moral imperfection? This incongruity

1.3. Translation-based monolingual target-language wordplay

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

presumed source language (here: Rumanian) is not at all required for

1.4. Interference-based monolingual target-language wordplay

Interference between languages may also occur below the morphemic

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

interference-based jokes in the British sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo depend on the

Of the four types of polyglot wordplay we have distinguished, only

(5) [Reads] ‘‘When as a lion’s whelp shall, to himself unknown, without

A soothsayer soon unravels this riddling prophecy in the play’s conclu-

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

monolingual source-language pun

monolingual source-language pun

Figure 1. Semiotic structure of translation-based monolingual source-language pun

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

(6) DROMIO OF EPHESUS: Mistress, respice ﬁnem, respect your end,

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

respect your end beware the rope’s end

respice finem respice funem

Figure 2. Semiotic structure of Dromio’s pun (Errors 4 (4), 43–45)

Let us now look at some examples of Shakespearean bilingual wordplay.

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

– French qualité (‘‘quality’’, ‘‘distinction’’) reminds Pistol of an equally

(7) b. KATHERINE: Comment appelez-vous le col?

Katherine’s teacher is her attendant Alice, whose English is hardly better

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

various degrees of linguistic imperfection or even ineptitude. These charac-

(8) a. EVANS: If there is one, I shall make two in the company.

This is a monolingual English joke (‘‘third’’ versus ‘‘turd’’), which is en-

(8) b. GOWER: [ . . . ] O, ’tis a gallant king!

While Fluellen’s ignorance underlies the substitution of ‘‘Alexander the

3. Semantics and politics

So far, we have looked at a variety of polyglot puns from the viewpoint

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

was in the process of establishing itself as a nation state with dominance

4. Semantics and pragmatics

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

between native tongue and foreign language, as well as between

4.1. Translation or not?

Translation is unthinkable without a correct understanding and applica-

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

COSTARD: Now will I look to this remuneration. ‘‘Remu-

4.2. Identiﬁcation of source and target languages

In the following instance, a Shakespearean character comically fails

(11) PETRUCHIO: Signor Hortensio, come you to part the fray?

Brought to you by | University of Iowa Libraries

4.3. Functional need