JAITS＜Article＞“I Am Cone Sold Stober”:
Challenges of Translating the Humor of Diana Wynne Jones’s
Howl’s Moving Castle into Japanese
Irina Novoselova(Kansai University)
Abstract
In the field of Translation Studies, humor is considered to be one of the most challenging aspects
of interlingual translation, its ephemeral essence often being difficult to preserve in anotherlanguage—in particular if the languages in question are as dissimilar as English and Japanese. This
study focuses on Junko Nishimura’s Japanese translation of Diana Wynne Jones’s British fantasy
novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), demonstrating how the language-bound and culture-specifichumor of the original text underwent a circumspect re-rendering to conform to Japanese language
conventions and target-readership expectations. The paper pursues the double objective of widening
the scope of research into the Japanese translations of Diana Wynne Jones’s compositions andinitiating a more constructive discussion of why “verbal humour travels badly” (Chiaro, 2010, p. 1)
across Anglophone and Japanese cultures. A discussion of linguistic and cultural differences followedby an analysis of Jones’s humor characteristics constitute the theoretical part of the study, while anempirical analysis of the translation methods used by Nishimura to render different comical devicesof the novel comprises the practical part.

1. Introduction
Although the problem of interlingual translation of humor1 has been covered in sufficient detailin the works of many researchers (Lefevere [1992], Delabastita [1997], Popa [2005], Chiaro[2010], Dore [2020], to name just a few), this topic can be safely called inexhaustible due to its
breadth. In the area of English–Japanese translation studies in particular, the cultural and linguistic
aspects of humor translation remain relatively unaddressed, compared to the contiguous area ofJapanese–English studies (cf. Blyth [1957], Wells [1997], Ōshima [2001, 2006], Hibbett [2002],
Davis [2006], and others). This work aims to partly fill in the lacuna by focusing on the Japanese

NOVOSELOVA, Irina, “‘I Am Cone Sold Stober’: Challenges of Translating the Humor of Diana Wynne
Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle into Japanese,“ Invitation to Interpreting and Translation Studies, No.23, 2021.
pages 23-46. © by the Japan Association for Interpreting and Translation Studies

In this work, the American spelling of the word “humor” is adopted. However, where the word appears
in citations, the British spelling (“humour”) is preserved.
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『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)

translation of humor elements in Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle(1986).
The children’s and young-adult novels of the British fantasist Diana Wynne Jones, abundantwith magic, twisting plots, charming characters, and sparkling humor, have been activelytranslated into various foreign languages. Howl’s Moving Castle (1986),2 one of the best-known
works that immediately became Jones’s hallmark, was brought to Japanese readers by thetranslator Junko Nishimura (Mahōtsukai Hauru to hi no akuma, 1997). The novel received special
attention, not least due to the fact that in 2004 Studio Ghibli, led by celebrated film director Hayao
Miyazaki, released a world-famous anime adaptation (Hauru no ugoku shiro, 2004).
This paper examines the re-rendering strategies and methods applied by Nishimura to various
humor elements in her Japanese translation of Howl’s Moving Castle (Mahōtsukai Hauru to hi noakuma) and argues that the introduction of different comical devices in the translated text was toa large extent informed by three main factors: 1) Japanese culture-bound rhetorical conventions
regarding certain types of humor (as will be further shown in the case studies, the presence orabsence of the source text’s humor in the Japanese translation frequently depends on thetranslator’s interpretation and judgment about its appropriateness and recognizability in the target
language culture); 2) linguistic dissimilarity, namely the (in)capacity of the target language(Japanese) to accommodate the source language’s (English) comical devices without distorting
their function (namely, to amuse the reader); and 3) specific characteristics of the author’s humor.
As this study will demonstrate, Jones’s writing style is replete with a type of humor that Butler(2002) describes as “what might be called the carnivalesque at one end of the spectrum to thesatirical or parodic” (Butler, 2002, p. 169), presenting certain difficulties for English–Japanesetranslation.
A brief overview of the first two determinants (culture-bound rhetorical conventions andlinguistic dissimilarity) complicating the English–Japanese translation of humor opens the paper.
The next section begins with a broad-brush outline of Diana Wynne Jones’s distinctive humor
features, then moves to the categorization of the comical devices employed in the fantasy novel
Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), suggesting some potentially problematic translation issues. A
correlation between the above three modalities and the translation strategies employed by Junko
Nishimura in Mahōtsukai Hauru to hi no akuma is demonstrated in the case study of several
excerpts wherein the novel’s humor elements are translated into Japanese. The paper concludes
with a reflection on the empirical work results, and suggests questions for further discussion.

2

The first novel of the Moving Castle trilogy; the sequels are Castle in the Air (1990) and House of Many
Ways (2008).

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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

2. The Complexity of Humor Rendering in English–Japanese (EJ) Translation
Before proceeding with the analysis of the Howl’s Moving Castle translation, it would be helpful
first to illuminate the main possible causes that may hinder the process of humor3 translation fromEnglish into Japanese. In this study, culture-bound rhetorical conventions and linguistic
dissimilarity are distinguished and used to describe the problem.
2.1. Culture-bound rhetorical conventions
Characterizing Japanese comic tradition, which dates back to ancient verses of Man’yōshū, 4Hibbett (2002) states that[it] may be indefinably elusive, but humor in Japan, pungent or poetical, from theseeming stability of the long Tokugawa era down to the unsettling changes of thelate twentieth century, has displayed extraordinary variety. [...] [H]omogenity is nota characteristic of Japanese humor.
(Hibbett, 2002, p. 11)
Perhaps, the “elusive” aspect of the Japanese humor, and the fact that “it is not always obvious
where exactly to look for permission for humor’s operations in Japan” (Davis, 2006, p. 1) haveunwittingly fueled the false conviction 5 among Anglophone cultures that “the humor of theJapanese is astonishingly mild and poetical, like weak, mint-flavoured tea” (Koestler, quoted in
Hibbett, 2002, p. 11).
However, a more plausible reason for such stereotype is rooted in the cultural difference that
presupposes a divergence in the way humor is expressed and used in Japanese and Anglophone
cultures. As Blyth describes it, “though there may not be a distinctively Oriental or Occidental
humour, the comic spirit is not unaffected by nationality” (Blyth, 1957, p. 1). While the skopos(purpose) of humor—to amuse the recipient—generally remains the same in any culture, themeans that are used to create the effect may vary (Chiaro, 2010). In literary writings, the kind ofhumor employed generally depends on the author, who orchestrates the creation of the entire text
and manipulates the reader’s reaction. Still, the choice of humor devices might be to some extent
governed by the culture-bound rhetorical conventions on which forms of humor are consideredmore or less acceptable. For example, satire, a clearly defined genre in English literature, is “oneof the forms of humor least seen in modern Japan” (Wells, cited in Davis, 2006, p. 193). That

In this work, the umbrella term “humor” is used for convenience, encompassing comical situations, jokes,
wordplay, puns, irony, mockery, wit, etc., both in English and Japanese languages.
4
The oldest Japanese waka poetry collection, compiled in the second half of the eighth century (Katō,
1997).
5This stereotype, however, has been repeatedly refuted in the works of both Japanese and Western scholars(see Hibbett (2002), Ōshima (2006), Takekuro (2006), Wells (1997) for details).
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does not mean that the genre itself does not exist in Japanese literature (Natsume Sōseki’s novels
I Am a Cat, 1906, and Botchan, 1906, are salient examples of a whimsical satire), but rather that
it is less accepted as a means of expressing comicality.
Following on from that, it is logical to assume that the transposition of humor from the source
language (SL) to the target language (TL) may be complicated if the type of humor (irony,oxymoron, parody, satire, pun, and so on) is uncommon in the target culture’s literature. Culturebound rhetorical conventions, in this case, refer to what can be called an unspoken agreement
among target-culture recipients (readers) to recognize and perceive the translated text as
humorous provided that it conforms with readers’ ideas of what is considered funny and amusing
in their own culture. In turn, for the translator, culture-bound rhetorical conventions of the TL
readership become one of the determining factors in the questions of how much of the original
humor can be represented in the translated version and by which means it can be done.
As will be further demonstrated in the example of Nishimura’s translation of the comical
devices in Howl’s Moving Castle, what conventionally fits and is funny in the source text’s (ST)context might not produce the same effect when rendered directly into the TL, or, even worse,
could confuse the readers of the target text (TT), who would not be able to recognize andappreciate the comical device because of its uncommonness in their culture.
The Japanese culture-bound rhetorical conventions, therefore, act as a wide-meshed sieve
through which the Anglophone humor of the ST must be sifted before actually being translated.
The next filter would be the TL itself.
2.2. Linguistic dissimilarity
If culture-bound rhetorical conventions are rather subtle and difficult to pinpoint as an obvious
hindrance for interlingual humor translation, linguistic dissimilarity (in other words, thedifference between SL and TL on orthographic, phonological, morphological, syntactical, andother levels) is more apparent and straightforward.
A detailed discussion of the differences between the English and Japanese languages is notpossible here due to the paper’s limited scope (see the works of Refsing & Lundquist, 2009;
Hasegawa, 2012; Donovan, 2020; Wakabayashi, 2021, and others). Suffice it to say that thephilological remoteness of the English and Japanese languages complicates the process of humortranslation: for example, wordplay of the English ST most likely will lose its comical effect (ifretain any meaning at all) if rendered directly into the Japanese TT. In comparison, linguisticallycognate languages of the same family group (Romance, Germanic, Slavic, etc.) are more
accommodating for transferring wordplay or puns.
Thus, linguistic dissimilarity can be seen as another major cause of humor’s “untranslatability”“in the sense that an adequate degree of equivalence is hard to achieve” (Chiaro, 2010, p. 8,
original emphasis). Indeed, when translating any kind of text, a translator, nolens volens, aims for26

“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

some sort of similarity between the ST and TT, pursuing either the “equivalence of form” or“equivalence of effect” (also known as “dynamic” or “functional equivalence”, Nida, 1964).
In the case of interlingual translation of humor, the equivalent effect (to amuse, to entertain)
to that of the original is desirable; therefore,
the formal equivalence, namely the similarity of lexis and syntax in source and target
versions, is frequently sacrificed for the sake of dynamic equivalence. […] [A]s long as
the TT serves the same function, […] it is of little importance if the TT has to departsomewhat in formal terms from the original.
(Chiaro, 2010, p. 8)This statement is disputable, however, since in many literary works (including Diana Wynne
Jones’s novels), the very form itself (the structure of the sentence, the word order, the use ofpunctuation) often becomes the tool of humor expression. It is reasonable to speculate that for
rendering such types of humor, formal equivalence would be more suitable due to its emphasis
on ST’s syntax and lexis. However, as Nishimura’s translation will show, it can rarely be achieved
because of the aforementioned fundamental morpho-syntactic differences between the Japaneseand English languages. This is not to say that “dynamic equivalence” is an easier option for atranslator, especially if he/she aims to be faithful to the original text and use SL-oriented
translation.
To sum up, the cultural and linguistic distance between the English and Japanese languages
are two evident factors that impede the process of humor translation. However, it would be naïve
to think that in literary translation, humor rendering is complex solely because of thesedifferences: this work aims to demonstrate that the author’s writing style and skill in using
language to convey the comical are equally important, and must be taken into account with theutmost consideration.
I will now move on to discussing the way humor functions in Diana Wynne Jones’s fantasy
novel Howl’s Moving Castle.
3. Funny, but not simple: humor typology in Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle
3.1. Distinctive traits of Jones’s humor
Being asked in one interview about whether the humor in her books “comes unbidden” or is theresult of her deliberate manipulations, Diana Wynne Jones answered the following:No, you can’t think deliberately about it, not if you want it to come out through the story
in a natural way. I do love ending up with very logical situations in which everything is
totally absurd. […] There’s no reason why one can’t make a serious point and be funny27

『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)

too, actually, and I always like to have something humorous in my books—but it’s thebook itself that dictates what kind of humour you’re going to have. Very early on, about
three pages in if you’re lucky, it sets its own mode, and you really can’t transgress fromthat without spoiling the book. You can’t force it to be funny, but if it wants to be funny,
I gallop along beside it saying “Come on, come on!” […].
(Jones, quoted in Butler, 2002, p. 169)
For this study, it is particularly useful to receive such an explicit commentary on this aspect ofwriting from the author herself. Interpreting Jones’s words, it is possible to say that humor,
naturally interwoven in the narration, aids its consolidation and enrichment, and is often perceived
by readers as a constant “humorous, compassionate voice” (Rosenberg, 2002, p. 1). To what
extent this effect can be reproduced in translation depends largely on how well the humorous
elements have been transferred from SL to TL. The following comment from translator Junko
Nishimura confirms that she also acknowledges the importance of humor in Jones’s writing:
The charm of Jones’s novels can be summed up in a few words: dizzyingly intricate andingenious plotting, unique characters, a British sense of humor combined withplayfulness, and the unusual use of magic.
(Nishimura, 1997, p. 308, author’s translation from the Japanese)
It is noteworthy that Nishimura describes Jones’s humor as British (Igirisu-jin rashī), thereby
emphasizing its cultural aspect. 6 But what exactly does that mean? What constitutes the“Britishness” of Jones’s humor, and how is it prominent in her writing? While the literaryprecursors from which Jones draws inspiration for her own novels have been sufficiently
addressed and analyzed (Mendlesohn, 2005; Rosenberg, 2002; Eastwood, 2014; and others), no
contemporary empirical evidence about the humor origins in Jones’s works has been reported,leaving space for interpretation. I believe that in addition to its innate sensibility, literary traditions
and the influence of other classical English writers played an important role in shaping Jones’s
unique “British humor.”
For example, Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, highly praised by Jones in her criticalessays “The Heroic Ideal—A Personal Odyssey” and “Inventing the Middle Ages” (Jones,
1989/2012), seems to have greatly influenced her way of expressing comicality. It can be traced,for example, in the way Jones uses gentle, slightly “patronizing” humor in describing her
characters:

6

According to Laineste (2014), the prevalent elements of British humor are innuendo, satire, ridicule,
intellectual humor, and puns. “It [British humor] ridicules mundane reality by satirically revealing theabsurdity of everyday life [...]” (Laineste, 2014, p. 542).

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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

In the land of Ingary, [...] it is quite a misfortune to be born the eldest of three. Everyone
knows you are the one who will fail first, and worst, if the three of you set out to seek
your fortunes. Sophie Hatter was the eldest of three sisters. She was not even the childof a poor woodcutter, which might have given her some chance of success! [...] Sophie
was the most studious. She read a great deal, and very soon realized how little chance
she had of an interesting future.
(Jones, 1986, pp. 1–2)
Likewise, the frequent quotes, allusions, and reminiscences found in Howl’s Moving Castle
suggest that the witty poetry of John Donne 7 and the literary nonsense of Lewis Carroll8 werealso important in shaping the very “British humor” mentioned by Nishimura. Furthermore, it isdifficult to ignore the apparent heritage of the chapters’ titling diction in the Moving Castle Series(reminiscent of Swift, Dickens, and other classical writers).9 The Swiftian and Dickensian motifs
in Howl’s Moving Castle can be traced by simple juxtaposition:
Table I: Comparison of the chapter titles of Howl’s Moving Castle, The Pickwick Papers, andGulliver’s Travels
Literary text

Chapter title

Diana Wynne Jones,

Chapter ThreeHowl’s Moving Castle (1986)

In Which Sophie Enters Into a Castle and a Bargain

Charles Dickens,
The Pickwick Papers (1836)

Chapter XXXV.
In which Mr. Pickwick thinks he had better go to Bath;and goes accordingly
Chapter 8

Jonathan Swift,

The Author, by a lucky accident, finds means to leave

Gulliver’s Travels (1726)

Blefuscu, and, after some difficulties, returns safe to his native
country

Donne’s poem Song (1633) quoted in Howl’s Moving Castle has a dual nature in the novel: on the one
hand it is a piece of poetry, studied at the school which Howl’s nephew attends; on the other hand, it is a
powerful magic spell (precisely speaking, a curse) sent by the Witch of the Waste to punish Howl. This canalso be seen as a good example of defamiliarization of the familiar, a trope often used by Jones.
8
Although the direct reference to the Mad Hatter from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) appears
only once in Chapter Twelve, Carroll’s “nonsense” is a recurring leitmotif in Howl’s Moving Castle (often
expressed through the absurdity of Howl’s utterances and actions).
9
It should be noted, however, that this way of titling chapters is not a unique British literary feature andcan be found in many other contemporaneous texts, for example in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1615):“Chapter I Which treats of the character and pursuits of the famous gentleman Don Quixote of la Mancha”(de Cervantes Saavedra, 1885/1952, p. 17).
7

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『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)

Of course, these findings are objectively insufficient to drive any concrete conclusions about
what influenced the formation of Jones’s humor, this aspect demanding separate in-depth
research; however, it is possible to see the traces of other humorous literary texts and the subtle
marks of English satirists that suffused the style of Jones’s fantasy novels. It can be suggested
that by describing Jones’s humor as “British,” Nishimura means the humor traditions that wereintentionally or unintentionally absorbed by Jones and later surfaced on the pages of Howl’sMoving Castle, giving it a particular “flavor.”
The “Britishness” of the humor is undoubtedly difficult to convey in the Japanese translation,
but in addition to that, the translator must take into account the intended readers of the TT:
children and young adults (at least, this is the category Tokuma Shoten Publishing Ltd targeted
when marketing Jones’s books in Japan; Novoselova, 2021). The question then arises, how well
can the target readers, presumably Japanese junior and senior high-school students, understandthe quirky English humor of Howl’s Moving Castle, spiced as it is with intertextuality? The first
key to answering this question lies in understanding how Jones treats her (Anglophone) readers.
Commenting on Jones’s style, White (2016) claims that[b]ecause of her conscious efforts to write sentences that can easily be read to or bychildren, Jones’s novels exhibit linguistic simplicity and directness, yet beneath theapparent simplicity are amazing depths […].
(White, 2016, p. 125)
The clarity of Jones’s writing appears on different levels, including humor. Noriko Ogiwara,a renowned Japanese fantasist, in her commentary on Howl’s Moving Castle states that Jones is“a writer who makes no attempt to hide the humor and meanness that accompanies it” (Ogiwara,
2004, p. 410, author’s translation from the Japanese). However, the overt humor of Jones’s writing
does not necessarily equate to simplicity, just as the clarity of the language does not undermine
the depth of the content.
As will be partly affirmed by the further analysis of humor elements in Howl’s Moving Castle,
Jones refuses to resort to simplifications, detailed explanations, or excessive clarifications(conventionally expected from children’s literature) to facilitate the reader’s task. As she puts it:
I never worry about putting in things that are not within children’s capacities, because I
don’t think this matters. I think it’s very good for children to notice that there’s something
going on that they don’t quite understand. This is a good feeling because it pulls you on
to find out.
(Jones, quoted in Butler, 2002, p. 172)30

“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

The same approach—to constantly stimulate the reader—can also be seen in the way humor isused in Jones’s fantasy novels, challenging the belief that “for children […] humour must be
simple and spontaneous” (Fisher, 1976, p. 154, original emphasis). Therefore, for the translator,
the task to render the comical in Jones’s novels is additionally complicated because the target
readership might not be able to perceive the humor due to its unconventionality. The following
section discusses in more detail the challenges of rendering Jones’s humor from English into
Japanese and presents a typology of the comical elements in Howl’s Moving Castle.
3.2. The categorization of humor devices in Howl’s Moving Castle
The three fantasy novels about magical castles and houses that constitute the Moving Castle Series
stand out among Jones’s other works; in particular, “these books present a much different tone
than the others that use oral tradition, lighter and wittier, bordering on slapstick, that puts them intheir own category” (Rosenberg, 2002, p. 5).
In order to better understand the challenges Nishimura faced when rendering Jones’s humor
into Japanese, it would be helpful to first determine the nature of the humor. The first book of thetrilogy, Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) exhibits different kinds of comical elements that fall into
four general categories introduced by Berger in his work An Anatomy of Humor (1993): language,
logic, identity, and action. The following table shows the main humor techniques of Howl’sMoving Castle grouped according to Berger’s typology and exemplified.
Table II: Most common humor techniques used in Howl’s Moving Castle
I. Language
Allusion
Exaggeration

Irony

Over literalness
Ridicule“We can’t all be Mad Hatters,” said Howl.
Howl’s voice was presently heard shouting weakly, “Help me, someone! I’m
dying from neglect up here!”“Why have you made a jigsaw puzzle of my best suit? Just a friendly inquiry,
you know.”“Didn’t know I used to fly up the wing for my university, [...] Mrs. Nose?”“If you were trying to fly, you must have forgotten how,” Sophie said.
“Is that all you can do in the face of tragedy?” Howl asked. “Make toast!”“Why should I be annoyed? Someone only filled the castle with rotten aspic, andSarcasmdeafened everyone in Porthaven, and scared Calcifer to a cinder, and broke a few
hundred hearts. Why should that annoy me?”II. Logic

Absurdity
Mistakes“My shining dishonesty will be the salvation of me.”
“I’m delirious,” said Howl. “Spots are crawling before my eyes.”“Those are spiders,” said Sophie.
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『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)“I’m not being nosy!” Sophie protested. [...]
Repetition“Yes, you are nosy,” said Howl. “You’re a dreadfully nosy, horribly bossy,
appallingly clean old woman.”III. Identity

Before/after

Eccentricity“Don’t worry, old thing,” Sophie said to the face. “You look quite healthy.
Besides, this is much more like you really are.”Howl came dashing out of the bathroom looking his very finest, scenting theroom with roses and yelling for Michael.
By the time he [Howl] touched the floor, he was a curly red setter, just like theImitation

dog-man. [...] The two identical dogs walked round one another, glaring,growling, bristling, and getting ready to fight.
IV. Action
There was a minute or so of helter-skelter chase, in which the dog ran hither andChasethither, whining in a disturbed way, and Mrs. Fairfax and Sophie ran after thedog, jumping flower beds and getting in one another’s way, and Michael ran after
Sophie crying, “Stop! You’ll make yourself ill!”“Howl says he’ll only look for Prince Justin if you promise him your daughter’s

Slapstickhand in marriage.” [...] The King gave her a concerned look. [...] After a second,
Princess Valeria shunted herself out from under the desk in sitting position,
grinning benignly. She had four teeth.
Zip! Back to the mansion. Zip! to Market Square. Zip! and there was the castle

Speed

yet again. She was getting the hang of it. Zip! Here was Upper Folding—but how
did you stop? Zip!

While this list cannot encompass all the shades of humor in Howl’s Moving Castle, it presents
the most overt of them. To facilitate the further analysis of the Japanese translation of the novel
given space constraints, I shall consolidate these four groups into the two broad classes of textual
humor suggested by Ritchie (2010): referential and verbal.
Referential (or conceptual) humour uses language to convey some meaning (e.g. a story,
a description of a situation or event) which is itself the source of humour, regardless ofthe medium used to convey it. Verbal humour, on the other hand, relies on the particularlanguage used to express it, so that it may use idiosyncratic features of the language [...].”(Ritchie, 2010, p. 34)
In other words, referential humor stems from the very content of the subject, verbal humor
from the form of it. In this work identity and action humor techniques are attributed to the32

“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

referential-humor category, and the comical devices of language and logic groups to the verbal.
The following excerpts from the novel are used to illustrate the issue. Examples I and II describe
the funny episode wherein the main heroine, Sophie, experiences difficulties walking in a sevenleague boot.
Example I: Referential humor in Howl’s Moving Castle
ST. Zip! Back to the mansion. Zip! to Market Square. Zip! and there was the castle yet again.
She was getting the hang of it. Zip! Here was Upper Folding—but how did you stop? Zip!
“Oh, confound it!” Sophie cried, almost in Marsh Folding again. This time she hopped
round very carefully and trod with great deliberation. Zip! And fortunately the boot landed
in a cowpat and she sat down with a thump.

The comicality of the situation—an old lady, frantically trying to stop the chaotic back and forthmarching in a magical seven-league boot, finally finds salvation in landing in the cowpat(normally an unwanted outcome)—is clear and ingenious, and can be characterized as containingreferential humor (Jones also uses speed as a comical tool to accelerate the narration and makethe episode funnier). The next example shows how Jones describes the same situation using verbal
humor expressed by the main male protagonist, Howl.
Example II: Verbal humor in Howl’s Moving Castle
ST: “I can also make you a pair of seven-league boots of your own if you give me your size.
Something practical in brown calf, perhaps. It’s amazing the way one can take a step ten and ahalf miles long and still always land in a cowpat.”

The last sentence is overt ridicule, which belongs to verbal humor techniques. It is possible toargue, however, that the aforecited examples contain elements of the contiguous category(Example I includes repetition, irony, onomatopoeia: “Zip!”). As will be shown, the humor types
in Howl’s Moving Castle do not easily succumb to categorization, since there is no clear division
between the groups. Ritchie explains that “[t]here appears to be no strict definition of theboundary between verbal and referential humour, with classification of examples being left togeneral intuition” (Ritchie, 2010, p. 35).
As shown in Example III below, Diana Wynne Jones successfully combines referential andverbal humor in her text.

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Example III: Combination of referential and verbal humor in Howl’s Moving Castle
ST. Meanwhile a certain amount of moaning and groaning was coming from upstairs. Sophie
kept muttering to the dog and ignored it. A loud, hollow coughing followed, dying away
into more moaning. Sophie ignored that too. Crashing sneezes followed the coughing, eachone rattling the window and all the doors. Sophie found those harder to ignore, but she
managed. Poootpooooot! went a blown nose, like a bassoon in a tunnel. The coughing
started again, mingled with moans. Sneezes mixed with the moans and the coughs, and thesounds rose to a crescendo in which Howl seemed to be managing to cough, groan, blow
his nose, sneeze, and wail gently all at the same time.

Not only does the situation itself contain humor, but the way in which it is described adds to its
grotesque comicality: Jones actively uses repetition, exaggeration, simile, even absurdity. The
humor of Howl’s Moving Castle probably can be better characterized as a continuous sequenceof so-called “jab lines”:
Jab lines are humorous elements which are fully integrated within the text in such a waythat they do not disrupt the narrative flow. [...] In fact, we can safely say that the textureof humorous talk as well as humorous prose, more often than not consists of aninterwoven tapestry of intermittent occurrences of jabs rather than a series of punches
which are the offspring of actual jokes.
(Chiaro, 2010, pp. 14–15)
On the one hand, by freely combining referential and verbal humor and “jab lines” in Howl’sMoving Castle (and in other novels as well), Jones creates her unique, recognizable humor that is
so attractive to Anglophone readers. On the other hand, however, such an approachunintentionally complicates the translator’s task: he/she has to not only preserve the overall“Britishness” of the humor but also find an appropriate comical equivalent (formal or dynamic)
in the TL that the readers would comprehend.
The following section aims to demonstrate Nishimura’s approach to rendering different typesof humor in Howl’s Moving Castle and presents a categorization of the applied translation
strategies.
4. Case study: Japanese translation of humor elements in Howl’s Moving Castle
In this practical section, Nishimura’s translation approaches (pursuing either formal or dynamic
equivalence) as applied to the ST’s comical devices (verbal or referential) are interpreted fromthe point of view of their dependence on such factors as culture-bound rhetorical conventions,language dissimilarity, and authorial style. For the sake of convenience, the analysis is divided
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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

into three sections: the examination of EJ (1) verbal humor rendering and (2) referential humor
rendering, and (3) the study of specific issues in humor translation that do not fit into the two firstgroups and hence expose the limitations of the presented categorization system.10
As has been noted before, the isolation of comical elements in Howl’s Moving Castle iscomplicated since Jones often combines verbal and referential humor techniques in her novels;
thus, in some cases presented here, the categories may overlap.
4.1. Japanese translation of the verbal humor in Howl’s Moving Castle
It is impossible here to cover all the diverse cases of verbal humor rendering in the Japaneseedition of Howl’s Moving Castle (hereafter HMC); therefore, I selected examples that clearly
demonstrate Nishimura’s approach to translating the ST’s verbal humor into Japanese. The
examples include exaggeration, irony, wordplay, allusion, and absurdity.
Example IV: Rendering of exaggeration in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. Chapter 5 Which is Far Too Full of Washing
TT. 五章 掃除、掃除、掃除
Here the ST humor lies in both exaggeration and the narrator’s intrusion into the diegetic spaceof the novel (bending the convention that the title should be neutral and descriptive, devoid of the“author’s voice”). While the TT does not recreate the latter aspect, it uses the verbatim repetitionof the word 掃除 (“cleaning”) to convey the ST title’s exaggeration (“Far Too Full”) andincongruity (a mundane task of washing emphasized as an important element of the chapter’splot). It is clear that formal equivalence in this case would run counter to both culture-boundrhetorical conventions and linguistic standards, since the Japanese literary texts do not use thistype of chapter titling (掃除がいっぱいの第 5 章 would be the minimally adequate translation
option); therefore, Nishimura resorted to a dynamic equivalence—exaggeration created byrepetition—to render the humor. As a result, the TT’s version, while not highly faithful to the ST,
preserves its function to amuse the reader.
Another type of “British” humor device that Jones favors in her novels and that presents a
difficulty for the EJ translation is irony. As Chiaro (2010) explains, “[i]t can sometimes be
extremely hard to understand whether someone is being ironic when they do not designate theirony via evident prosodic or stylistic features” (Chiaro, 2010, p. 15); this is fair for Jones’s
writing, which equilibrates between a gentle nudging of her characters and a frank description of
their foibles, as shown in the following example:

10

Given the limited scope of this paper, I have selected only the most salient and interesting cases toillustrate the three categories, unavoidably weeding out many other worthy examples.

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Example V: Rendering of irony in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. That night, as she sewed, Sophie admitted to herself that her life was rather dull. Instead oftalking to the hats, she tried each one on as she finished it and looked in the mirror. This was a
mistake.
TT. その晩、 帽子を作りながらソフィーは、毎日がつまらない、とはっきり思いました。そこで帽子に話しかけるかわりに、仕上げた帽子をかぶっては鏡をのぞいてみることにしました。でも、これはうまくいきませんでした。

The ironic, pithy comment (another author’s intrusion) at the end almost amounts to ツッコミ
(tsukkomi, a sharp, witty remark),11 but Nishimura does not attempt to render it in her translation,using a much milder expression “it didn’t go well.” We can surmise two explanations for suchtranslation. Firstly, if translated literally (ex. これは間違いだった/ これは失敗でした) thisphrase might sound slightly ambiguous and cause a misunderstanding among readers: Was Sophie
wearing the hat the wrong way, was there something unusual with the mirror, etc.? Even though
the explanation follows right after, a split-second confusion would still disturb the reading and istherefore avoided with the help of a more straightforward phrasing. Secondly, the mitigation ofirony may be attributed to the culture-bound rhetorical conventions: perhaps the translator fears
that children, not accustomed to such humor device, will not be able to understand the irony orwill perceive the phrase too literally and, accordingly, will not find it amusing.
The translation is further simplified by the added conjunction でも (“but”) that logicallyconnects the sentences, making the TT more coherent, even though such “unforeseeable” jab lines
are common in Jones’s writing and constitute her style. Nishimura achieves a certain level of the
dynamic equivalence (both ST and TT play on frustrated expectations), even though the
humoristic element in the Japanese translation is diluted.
I shall move to another comical element that while not being as frequently used in the Moving
Castle Series as the other verbal humor devices nonetheless presents an interesting case for the
analysis: wordplay.
Example VI: Rendering of wordplay in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. “Go to bed, you fool,” Calcifer said sleepily. “You’re drunk.”“Who, me?” said Howl. “I assure you, my friends, I am cone sold stober.”TT. 「早く寝ろよ、まぬけ」カルシファーが眠そうに言いました。「あんた、酔っぱらってら」「誰、ぼくのこと？言っとくけどね、ぼくはしーらふそのもんさ」

11

The term originates from the Japanese stand-up comedy show known as manzai (漫才 comic dialogue),
where two comedians take the roles of boke (ボケ fool) and tsukkomi (つっこみ wit or straight man) and“amuse an audience with their quick-fire banter” (Inoue, 2006, p. 29).

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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

Obviously, what Howl meant to say was “stone-cold sober,” but being very drunk, he mixed up
the beginnings of the words (stone-cold sober), producing a funny yet intelligible gibberish (inlinguistic terms, metathesis, the transposition of sounds). For the translator, the challenge, in thiscase, was to come up with equivalent Japanese wordplay based on transposition that would still
be recognizable to the readers. The linguistic dissimilarity between English and Japanese
discussed earlier manifests itself clearly in this example: if swapping words’ first letters in the
English ST creates a humorous effect, the same approach applied in the TT may not have a directly
equivalent result.12
Nishimura’s solution is to write the key-word しらふ (“sober”) in hiragana, elongating thesound し with a dash, which makes the word sound incorrect but still recognizable. Even though
the translated doppelganger differs from the original wordplay, the amusing element isnevertheless preserved in the TT and reinforced by the informal expression そのもんさ (approx.
“that’s right”). As we can see from this example, Nishimura, while constrained in her translation
options by the dissimilarity of the two languages, draws on the linguistic tools that the Japanese
language suggests to tackle the “untranslatable” humor element.
The last humor techniques discussed in this section are allusion and absurdity, combined in
one excerpt.
Example VII: Rendering of allusion + absurdity in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. He picked the skull out of the sink and held it in one hand, mournfully. “Alas, poor Yorick!”he said. “She heard mermaids, so it follows there is something rotten in the state of Denmark.
I have caught an everlasting cold, but luckily I am terribly dishonest. I cling to that.”TT. 流しにどけられていた頭蓋骨をつかみ、片手にのせて、憂鬱そうにこう言ったからです。「あわれ、ヨーリックよ！（＊）ソフィーは人魚の声を聞いた。となると、デンマークでは何かが腐っていることになる。ぼくはとわに続く風邪につかまった。幸いにして、ぼくって不正直きわまりないやつだろ、だからあの呪いの『正直者の風』という一行だけは実現しそうにない。それだけが頼みの綱だな」

In this scene, Howl quotes famous lines from Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (single underline). The
first thing that catches the eye when we look at the Japanese translation is the presence of afootnote（＊）that explains the allusion: “[i]t is a reference to the scene in Shakespeare’s play
Hamlet wherein Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, talks to the skull of a man named Yorick”

12

That does not imply that the Japanese language is deprived of such humoristic device as wordplay; on
the contrary, punning or sha-re (しゃれ; 洒落) is “the most frequently used technique to provoke laughter
in Japan” (Nagashima, 2006, p. 75).

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『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)(Nishimura, 2013, p. 303, author’s translation from the Japanese). 13 As has been mentioned
earlier, Jones supplies her texts with allusions without fear that the Anglophone reader will not
be able to decode them: “[t]he reading child, Jones seems to be saying, has an unconscious
awareness of intertextuality” (Mendlesohn, 2005, p. 194). However, for a Japanese target reader,literary allusions to classical English texts may remain obscure, possibly due to the lack ofbackground knowledge of Anglophone literature (one can only appreciate humor if one is capableof understanding it); thus, in order to retain even a fraction of the allusion’s comical effect, anancillary piece of information is desirable. It is not clear whether it was due to the translator’s
initiative or editorial policy, but throughout the Japanese edition of Howl’s Moving Castle allallusions and intertextualities are accompanied by footnotes: a translation crutch, indispensable
rather than optional.
The second element that presents difficulty for EJ translation in this excerpt is absurdity(double underline). Absurdity, according to Berger (1993), “doesn’t necessarily take the form ofsilliness [...] but may be an example of a relatively sophisticated philosophical position” (Berger,
1993, p. 19); it is the “sophisticated” aspect that Jones makes use of in her novels. What on thesurface seems just an illogical string of words in the ST is actually a very concise summary of thelatest events to have occurred in the novel: Howl got cursed by the Witch of the Waste (the curse
is John Donne’s Song wherein mermaids, wind (cold), and an honest mind are mentioned);
however, until he, a very dishonest and “slithering-out” wizard, actually becomes an honest
person, the curse will not be fulfilled. That is why he says that he will “cling to that.” In otherwords, the alleged absurdity of this excerpt draws its comicality from its tightly compressed
narrative re-enactment.
Jones, in her usual manner, leaves hints and bits of important information in each chapter, sothat in the end, an attentive reader gathering all those pieces of the jigsaw can construct the whole
picture. It is possible to say that in Jones’s works, “the space between beginning and end in
narrative is where the reader will be involved in doing work” (Cobley, 2014, p. 11). However, as
we see from the Japanese translation, Nishimura, while recognizing absurdity as an importantelement of Jones’ writing style, nonetheless succumbs to the temptation of simplifying thereader’s task by adding a short explanation: “[t]hat’s why that one line of the curse, “Wind of
Honesty,” is unlikely to come true” (author’s translation from the Japanese). Nishimura, thus,
takes on part of the reader’s work and deciphers the key element of the passage, leaving little
chance that this excerpt would have the equivalent humor effect in the TT.

It is interesting that Nishimura explains only one part of the allusion. Indeed, the line “Alas, poor Yorick!”belongs to Prince Hamlet (Hamlet, Act 8 Scene 10); however, the famous “something is rotten in the stateof Denmark” appears much earlier in the play and is uttered by Marcellus (Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 4). Either
the translator thought that this is insignificant or, perhaps, she did not want to overload the note with too
many details.
13

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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle

One can argue that when a complex literary text with “subtle humor” like in Howl’s Moving
Castle is translated into Japanese, decoding of the absurdity is unavoidable if one is to avoid its
removal. But, on the other hand, such translatorial interference runs counter to Jones’s idea thatchildren should develop “critical reading” skills (and, by the same token, cultivate a sensitivity to
implicit humor).
Having presented examples of verbal humor rendering in the Japanese translation of Howl’sMoving Castle I will now move to the next category: referential humor.
4.2. Japanese translation of the referential humor in Howl’s Moving Castle
To demonstrate Nishimura’s translation approaches for rendering referential humor in HMC I
have selected examples that use speed and before/after (transformation) as humor devices (thechoice was informed by the minimal admixture of verbal humor in these passages).
Example VIII: Rendering of speed in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. Zip! Back to the mansion. Zip! to Market Square. Zip! and there was the castle yet again. She
was getting the hang of it. Zip! Here was Upper Folding—but how did you stop? Zip!
TT. ぴゅっで、さっきの大邸宅。ぴゅっで、〈がやがや広場〉。ぴゅっで、またもや城です。じょじょにこつがわかってきました。 ぴゅっ。〈上折れ谷〉です──でも、どうすれば止まれるのでしょう？ぴゅっ。

This scene has been discussed earlier, but I would like to highlight the apparent formal
equivalence between the ST and TT. The comicality of this passage is based on its speed, withshort sentences and the onomatopoeic “Zip!” visually representing the rapid change of scenes, thefast movement of the character in space. To better render this humor element, the translator has
to follow the original wording, and we can see from the following two elements that Nishimura’stranslation indeed departs little from the original form: preserved noun-ended sentences (which
are not very typical for the Japanese language, meaning that Nishimura purposely backtracks fromthe TL conventions); and similar use of punctuation (long dash, question mark). Althoughexclamation marks (less often used in Japanese than English) are replaced with commas andperiods, this does not significantly disturb the form and the rhythm of the passage. The analysis
thus suggests that Nishimura makes use of formal equivalence for rendering the referential humorof the novel. The following is another example of Nishimura’s favoring of formal equivalency inrendering referential humor.

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Example IX: Rendering of before/after in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. Sophie and Michael ran to the broom cupboard, where they seized a velvet cloak each and flungthem on. Sophie got the one that turned its wearer into a red-bearded man. Now she knew why
Calcifer had laughed at her in the other one. Michael was a horse.
TT. ソフィーとマイケルは物置に走り、ビロードのマントをそれぞれはおりました。ソフィーのマント
は赤ひげの男に変わるほうでした。ソフィーは前にもう一枚のマントをはおったとき、カルシ
ファーに笑われたわけがようやくわかりました。そのマントを着たマイケルが、馬になったからです。

The “before and after” humor technique (also known as “metamorphosis” and “transformation”)
can “generate humor two ways—by ridiculing others who do not change and may be very rigid
or by ridiculing the person who changes” (Berger, 1993, pp. 23–24). This excerpt, thus,
exemplifies the second type of humor source.
As in the previous example, Nishimura does not significantly move away from the ST’s
structure, creating as she does a formally equivalent translation. However, the final part of the ST,
which contains the core of the referential humor (based on an incongruity), is more explicit in theJapanese translation: compare ST. “Michael was a horse” and TT. “Because Michael, wearingthat cloak, became a horse” (author’s translation from the Japanese). Again, to make the humorof this scene more accessible and less ambiguous, Nishimura supplies her translation with
explanatory details such as そのマントを着た, になった, and から (an approach we saw in
Examples V and VII).
Based on this very limited snapshot analysis, we may nevertheless infer that in cases where
following the ST’s form does not openly conflict with TL norms, Nishimura’s approach torendering the novel’s referential humor is overall biased toward formal equivalency, albeit
deliberately purging possible ambiguity and interspersing concise clarifications where needed.
Finally, I would like to briefly discuss several cases which cannot be definitively attributed tothe two categories described above.
4.3. Specific humor-rendering issues in the Japanese translation of Howl’s Moving Castle
The value of the following examples is that they demonstrate (1) how any categorization of humor,
including the one presented in this work, is conditional and labile, and (2) that in some cases, it iseffectively impossible to point to the exact reason why the translator chose one or anothertranslation method.

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Example X: Mistranslation of humor in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. [H]e held the shiny gray paper out in front of Neil. Both boys looked at it. Neil said, “It’s apoem,” in the way most people would say, “It’s a dead rat.” “It’s the one Miss Angorian set
for last week’s homework,” said the other boy. “I remember ‘wind’ and ‘finned.’ It’s aboutsubmarines.”
TT. ハウルはニールの顔の前につやのある灰色の紙をかざしました。少年たちはそれを眺めました。ニールが「詩だ」と答えましたが、その口調は誰かが「死んだネズミだ」と言うときと同じ、うんざりした調子でした。「アンゴリアン先生が先週の宿題に出したやつだね」もう一人の少年が言います。「『風を見つけろ』とかいうとこを覚えてるよ、帆船のことだろ」

Why would Nishimura translate the word “submarines” as 帆船 (a sailing ship)? It is apparent
that Jones uses a mistake as a humor technique in this scene: a young boy confuses the sailingboat, which uses the wind in sails to move, with a submarine that floats under the water. Could it
be that Nishimura considered this joke too obscure and decided to avoid it altogether? Or perhaps
she thought that there is a logical mistake in the ST and “corrected” it? As Chiaro (2010)
characterizes, “[w]hen an example of VEH [verbally expressed humor] is ignored in translation,
we can never be quite sure whether the omission is due to a deliberate translational strategy or to
the lack of recognition of the original wordplay” (Chiaro, 2010, p. 12).
Example XI: Substitution of humor in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. He got up and stalked upstairs, feeling for the wall as if he thought it might escape him unlesshe kept in touch with it. His bedroom door did escape him. “What a lie that was!” Howl
remarked as he walked into the wall.
TT. ハウルは立ちあがると、勢いよく二階へ進みましたが、壁に触っているところを見ると、そうでもしないと壁に逃げられると思いこんでいるようです。もっとも寝室の扉には逃げられたようでした。「今日が呪いが完結する日だなんて、噓っぱち」壁にぶちあたったハウルは言いました。

This excerpt serves as a fine example of Jones freely combining different humor techniques within
one scene: slapstick (Howl bumps into the door), absurdity (the door “escapes” him), and irony(dramatic exclamation). While the first two comical elements are delivered unchanged in theJapanese TT, the last part is drastically different from the original and translated as:“[u]nbelievable that today is the day when the curse will be completed” (author’s back translationfrom the Japanese). Perhaps, the reason for such rendering lies in misinterpretation.
In this scene, drunk Howl walks into the wall, thinking that the door “deceived” him and“escaped”; therefore, he says, “What a lie that was!” (about the door). I tend to interpret it this41

『翻訳研究への招待』No.23 (2021)

way also because the word “remarked” is used. I suspect that either Nishimura misinterpreted thisphrase, or she decided that direct translation would not work in the Japanese TT (as we have seen,
she tries to eliminate possible ambiguity in her translation), and thus used substitution to makethe text more coherent (and to connect it to the following sentences, where Howl actually talks
about the curse).
Example XII: Humor amplification in the Japanese translation of HMC
ST. “What are you doing?” cried Michael and Calcifer in a horrified chorus.
“Cleaning up,” Sophie replied firmly.
TT. 「何する気？」マイケルとカルシファーがおびえて叫びます。
「そ、う、じ」ソフィーはきっぱり答えました。

In rare cases, Nishimura deliberately manipulates the translation to make it sound funnier thanthe original text, as shown in the example above. The contrast between Michael and Calcifer’s
reaction and Sophie’s words constitutes the comicality of the situation. However, in the TT, it isstressed even more by the way Nishimura splits the word 掃除 (“cleaning”) into morae andseparates each with a comma, slowing down the reading and amplifying the comical effect. It canprobably be considered as a compensatory technique: since in many cases Nishimura has to dilutethe humor to fit the translation into the TL conventions, she tries to balance it by adding humor
in some other places, maintaining the overall humorous tone of the original novel.
5. Findings’ significanceTo sum up, the presented examples illustrate the challenges Nishimura had to face when renderingHowl’s Moving Castle humor elements from English into Japanese. The analysis of the translationof different humor techniques suggests that Nishimura’s translation choices were predominantly
influenced both by the comical devices’ stylistic value in the original text and equally theimperative of adherence to TL cultural and linguistic conventions.
The analysis indicated that Nishimura’s overall strategy is to use dynamic (functional)
equivalence when rendering verbal humor (since linguistic dissimilarity hinders the verbatim
transmission of the language-based humor), and formal equivalence when dealing with referential(conceptual) humor (where the language’s main contribution is to convey some information,
meaning, description of a situation, etc.); this pattern can be traced throughout the TT. However,when the culture-bound rhetorical conventions of the TL do not permit the direct rendering of thehumor, the translator sometimes resorts to explications (as can be seen in Examples V, VII, IX,
and XI).
The results of this study suggest that even though some comical elements of Howl’s Moving
Castle (1986) were filtered out in the process of EJ translation, Mahōtsukai Hauru to hi no akuma
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“I Am Cone Sold Stober”: Translating the Humor of Howl’s Moving Castle(1997) nonetheless preserves the novel’s jeu d’esprit and gives Japanese readers an insight into
what “British” humor is. A rather balanced approach taken by Nishimura allows her to entertain
the target Japanese readers (children and young adults) without overloading them with unfamiliar
usage of comical devices.
Thus, Nishimura’s rendering of Jones’s verbal wit and physical comedy has shown inmicrocosm how the “alien” Anglophone humor can be possibly accommodated in Japanese
literary translation to be enjoyed by readers of a different cultural background.
6. Conclusion
This study has investigated the challenges the translator Junko Nishimura faced when rendering
the humor of Diana Jones’s fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986) from English into
Japanese. In particular, Japanese culture-bound rhetorical conventions, the linguistic dissimilarity
between English and Japanese, and specific features of Jones’s humor were distinguished as themain governing factors that informed Nishiura’s decisions on how to introduce the humor of theoriginal novel into her translation.
The theoretical section demonstrated that apart from different perceptions of humor in
Anglophone and Japanese cultures, and the linguistic limitations that preclude the importation ofsome comical devices into the TL, Diana Wynne Jones’s writing style itself constitutes a problem
for interlingual translation: notwithstanding her being a children’s and young-adult writer, herworks exhibit great narrative depth, complex intertextuality, and at times subtle humor. By
adopting the typology of humor techniques in narratives suggested by Berger (1993) and Ritchie’sclassification of humor (2010), I attempted to categorize the frequent comical elements of Jones’s
novel Howl’s Moving Castle and then show how the author combines them in her writing, creatinga particular type of humor which Nishimura described as “British.”
The translation analysis section examined the translator’s approaches to rendering the verbal
and referential humor of the original text; the examples used in this study were selected to show
the diversity and complexity of the humor translation issues. An overall tendency can be noted in
Nishimura’s use of dynamic equivalence when translating the ST’s verbal humor and formal
equivalence for transmitting referential comical devices. I believe these findings justify the choiceof the subject material and can be further extrapolated to other investigations of humor rendering
in English–Japanese literary translation.
To sum up, this brief treatment of the problem of EJ humor translation leaves a vast field open
for further research on both Diana Wynne Jones’s writings and interlingual rendering of humor.
One potential avenue that I would like to suggest includes the analysis of other novels from theMoving Castle series and the discussion of humor translation by Izumi Ichida (who worked on
the last book of the trilogy) and its comparison with Nishimura’s approaches.

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About the author
Irina Novoselova is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate School of Letters at Kansai University inOsaka, Japan. Her main research interests are comparative literature, literary translation,translation theories, and language policies.
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