Translating SFTH’s Puns 😵
Puns are true nightmares to translate, and SFTH has loads of them. Do you want to know what’s been keeping me awake at night? If yes, check out this post. I will list the puns by how much I’m satisfied with what I delivered, so the last one is one of my proudest achievements when translating SFTH’s jokes :D
Usually with a pun, you have three options:
find the equivalent pun in the target language, which barely ever happens.
come up with a new pun that has nothing to do with the original pun, but retains the humour
if all else fails, ignore the pun and go cry in a corner
I’ve been defeated once by the triple “bar” pun in the Change - Mediocre Pub video. It may sound impressive, but that’s only because I only finished exactly 50 SFTH videos at the moment I’m typing this post. More defeats are on the horizon, I can sense them all the way from here 😱
Spectre vs Spectator
This one was quite impossible to translate, and I’m not too happy with the “solution” I found.
“spectator” is “khán giả”, “người xem”, “người quan sát”…
“spectre” is “bóng ma”, “hồn ma”…
Without knowing Vietnamese, you can still see those words have nothing to do with each other.
After racking my brain and scouring the Internet, I settled on “người xem” (watcher/spectator), and “người âm” (“people” from “down there”, which is just ghosts). I don’t think anyone would mistake “người âm” to “người xem”, but “spectre” and “spectator” are not easy to be mixed up either. So… let’s blame AJ 😶🌫️
“The kid was dense”
Apparently, AJ doesn’t know what “dense” means, but that doesn’t spare me from translating it 🫠
The “dense” used for AJ can be translated to “dốt đặc”. Concidentally, “đặc” also is the “dense” used for the Rolex watch. However, the “đặc” alone wouldn’t mean “stupid”, “dốt” is the keyword here, “đặc” is just there to emphasise and give imagery. The solution is to put “dốt” in brackets:
Thằng nhóc (dốt) đặc. Đặc như đồng hồ Rolex bị nhồi quá nhiều tính năng.
“I don’t know to from fro” - “I don’t know if I got a fro”
This game is one of the most popular SFTH videos to date, it helped launch the group to their current level of international popularity. I love this video so much.
“Fro” is a hairstyle of black people, and we don’t even have a word for it in Vietnamese. “To and fro” would be “tiến và lùi”, which of course has nothing to do with hair.
Lucky for me, right before that, AJ said “I don’t know left from right”, so I don’t actually have to stick with “fro”, but I still have to ensure Luke’s “You’re bald” make sense. The solution is “I don’t know if my hair is parted right”, which I think fits perfectly for the scene.
Wedding vs Wetting Catalogue
This is a mistake, an unintentional pun, but this time it’s Tom and not AJ.
Tom mispronounced “wedding”, and it wouldn’t have been that big of a deal, but of course, the man had to turn it into a whole nother (NSFW) joke.
It’s quite impossible to connect “wedding” and “wetting” to make the joke work in Vietnamese, so I switched the word “catalogue” to “menu” and dealt with that instead. In Vietnamese, “menu” is “thực đơn”. “Thực” means “eating”, but it doesn’t work alone as a verb, we don’t say “I thực rice.” However, oddly “xực”, the “mispronounced” version of it does, and it’s quite crude and can be used for suggestive or sexual activities, so it fits incredibly well in the context.
Reverse translation:
The wedding xực đơn here is good, isn’t it? Although I’m really looking forward to the day we xực each other.
Wales vs Whales
I love how Tom’s limits are tested in this game 😂 Sam was ruthless.
The Wales - whales pun is quite clever, and it turned the whole story into a new direction. It also turned my sanity against me 🫠
Unlike “England” (Anh), or “America” (Mỹ), there’s no Vietnamese name for “Wales”, we just write “Wales”.
“Whale” is “cá voi” in Vietnamese, which is a funny word because it literally means “elephant fish”, but I digress.
“Whale” doesn’t work here, so I switch to “dolphin”. “Dolphin” is “cá heo” (which is “pig fish”; why? I have no idea…). I altered it to “cá hêu”, which sounds close to Wales (pronounced as “guêu”). You see the “êu” sound? It’s close enough to rhyme :D
Nymphs vs Nymphomaniac
This pun is so clever, hats off to Tom. For this section, I’d say “Children, turn away”, but SFTH chose to post this video to their whole audience, so what much could I even do? 🤷🏻
A “nymph” is a mythological spirit of nature. We don’t have a specific translation for a nymph, but the “fae” group can be all translated to “tiên”.
A “nymphomaniac” is someone who’s… crazy about sex. The closest translation I could think of is “người nghiện tình dục” (sex addict), or “người cuồng dâm”, nothing to do with “tiên”.
There’s a cool language trick called spoonerism, it’s when you swap the consonants and vowels between syllables of a word, or words. In Vietnamese, spoonerism is very common, way more common than in English. Maybe it’s because of how our words are constructed, with separated syllables, and a word usually only has one or two syllables, four max.
I took advantage of this, turning the word “điên tình” (crazy about love) into “tiên đình”, and put the original word in brackets. The word itself is not sexual, but that can be implied, and it works so well for the joke.
It’s been a long post, thank you for still reading. There might have been more puns but these are all I remember for now. There will be a part two, at some point, because SFTH throw puns at me constantly, intentionally or not.
The next episode will be about something very peculiar about Vietnamese: Pronouns :D
