Ohhh. So, one of the overhead light bulbs in the office just blew, so one of my colleagues got up on a stepladder to try to wrestle apart the light fixture (pretty, arty, but not very convenient when you need to actually get in there and change a bulb) and the rest of us hovered around, stabilizing the stepladder, handing things up to him, giving unhelpful advice, etc.
The whole thing looked very silly (there were four of us, to change a single bulb) and I was tempted to try to make a "How many translators does it take to screw in a light bulb?" joke, at which point I learned that apparently the rest of the world doesn't have light bulb jokes! (The colleagues are French and German.) Sad. I sort of tried to explain the concept, and looked up some examples online, and my colleague kind of got it, but a joke's just not the same once you've had to explain it.
"Why light bulbs specifically?" he asked.
I don't really know – maybe because it's such a simple, mundane task that should be eminently doable by one person, so it lends itself well to being distorted in various humorous directions?
Anyway:
How many translators does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Four: one to replace the bulb and three to research the relevant cultural context in the target language! :-)
No comments:
Post a Comment