Lost in Translation: Becker 1994

Becker looks at a very particular and very literal kind of prior text in his article, "Repetition and Otherness:" an actual translation of a passage in Classical Malay. He notes the ways in which prior texts define a community and are used by a community, particularly as tropes from which to build other texts, for example, the "how many x does it take to screw in a lightbulb?" This one rang as particularly salient for me--as a graduate student, I spend a great deal of time with other graduate students and newly-minted Ph.D.s, and as a result whenever it takes more than one of us to accomplish some menial task, like putting together a new coffee table, someone inevitably says something along the lines of, "How many Ph.D.s does it take/how many years of graduate education does it take to do x?" In invoking the joke, we're of course tying in not only to the prior text of the "how many" joke, but also in to the humor of the incongruity of whatever (seemingly) simple task we're trying to perform and the supposed expertise that arises from having such advanced educations.

I found most intriguing in Becker's work the idea of the "untranslatable" tropes which rely on these sorts of common prior texts. Even though presumably one could translate a joke such as this one into another language, without the prior text of the joke's history, much of its humor is lost. Instead of drawing on a bank of similar jokes in the listeners' collective memories, it is only an isolated statement, which may have some intrinsic humor by way of incongruities such as the one I mentioned above, but which loses a significant portion of its humor in the absence of the ability to draw on the prior texts of what other versions of the joke have preceded this particular telling.

One thing I also found intriguing was the idea of prior text being invoked by the way in which a text is presented visually. For the Malay speakers, the text under discussion is presented in Arabic, which creates an intertextual tie to the Islamic holy texts which the Malay speakers would have encountered. Although sociolinguists focus a great deal on form in terms of things like syntactic structure, adjacency pairs and the like, we miss a great deal of things which can be communicated by other issues of form, such as prosody and the actual form of in which written text is presented. Sometimes we look at this in terms of some visual representations, and some slxs have looked at, for example, the way the form of a transcript affects the way we think of it (I'm thinking of Bucholtz's article on the politics of transcription here), but I find that on the whole, we could do more in looking at the actual presentation of text to the "reader" (or hearer) of that text.

Becker's article also reminds me of Agha's work on naming, and the way the "baptisimal event" of name-giving invokes the prior texts (my lamination of this term onto Agha's work) of all who have had that name before. Extending the notion of prior text and repetition onto this part of Agha's analysis might yield interesting results.