Galia Hirsch

Bar Ilan University | BIU · Department of Translation and Interpreting Studies

The article examines the pragmatic functions of the Hebrew graphic laughter marker “hhh” in a particularly turbulent public-political discursive arena – online readers’ comments to Facebook posts by the two leading contenders for the post of Israeli prime minister during the 2020 election campaign, Benjamin Netanyahu and Benny Gantz. We argue that...

This article examines a specific type of supportive, make-believe, playful humour called here flirting humour, which serves to create a positioning of symmetry and intimacy, while posing a mitigated threat to the face of the addresser and addressee. We focus on two sub-categories of this humour prevalent in online readers’ comments to Facebook post...

On the face of it, it appears that the explicitation of contextual knowledge is consistent with Toury’s (1995) norm of acceptability rather than his norm of adequacy. This is because this type of explicitation, which seeks to bridge the gap in readers’ contextual knowledge, enhances readability and is directed towards the target audience. However,...

This research seeks to identify and analyze humorous and ironic readers' (online) comments to a post of an Israeli controversial politician – Miri Regev – on Facebook, in view of the specific nature of this genre, which has been known to allow a certain level of threat to face. My intention was to compare indirect readers’ comments to direct ones i...

Building on various theoretical approaches to translation ( Hickey 1998 ; Bassnett 2001 ), this article demonstrates the intersection between translation and parody ( Aoyama and Wakabayashi 1999 ) by comparing two musical texts: Rachid Taha’s “Douce France” and Seu Jorge’s Portuguese trans­lation of David Bowie’s “Life on Mars?”. According to Linda...

The paradox that lies at the heart of the phenomenon of explicitation, taken as a broad category, is that explicitation on one level of analysis can correspond to implicitation on another. Some explicitations add or change linguistic elements to clarify the original text, others serve to reinforce the original speaker’s attitude; however, clarifyin...

This contribution will compare an excerpt from the film Downfall (Der Untergang) – depicting the final ten days of Adolf Hitler's rule over Germany – to parodic subtitles added to the scene in three languages: English, Hebrew and Spanish. Different versions of this scene were uploaded to YouTube by users featuring subtitles in different languages,...

This article discusses the occurrence of voids in the intersection between Hebrew and Israeli Sign Language (ISL). Using Weizman's classification of voids (2010, 2016) in our analysis, we have discovered that languages that employ visual and auditory modalities make use of an additional category of voids: modality-induced voids. Our corpus consists...

This research compares audience ranking of popular Internet jokes and the mechanisms of humor underlying their successfulness. It explores the audience's point of view, in order to shed light on a possible correlation between high rankings and specific mechanisms, as well as different preferences of specific languages. Jokes were chosen as the rese...

The goal of this contribution is to explore the relationship between the target of certain ironic instances and the source of their echoic mentions (Sperber and Wilson, “Irony and the use-mention distinction,” in Peter Cole’s Radical Pragmatics, Academic Press, New York, 1981; Wilson and Sperber, “On verbal irony,” Lingua 87, 1992), discussing spec...

This research seeks to identify and analyze the reaction to irony in Israeli political news interviews, in view of the specific nature of this genre, which has been known to allow a certain level of adversarialness (Liebes et al. 2008; Blum-Kulka 1983; Weizman 2008; Clayman &Heritage 2002a and 2002b). Our intention was to examine whether the audien...

This contribution investigates the detection of irony in Israeli political news interviews exploring the viewers’ perception of the interaction. Our aim was to discover whether viewers tend to detect irony employed by interviewers and directed toward interviewees and whether they believe the latter have interpreted it. Our approach to the analysis...

The goal of this article is to examine the differences in the use of explicitation strategies when translating irony and humor, based on a comparative model that distinguishes between cues for the two phenomena. The study suggests that translations of irony manifest more explicitations, whereas translations of humor yield more non-explicitating shi...

The goal of this paper is to propose a model that distinguishes between irony and humor in the context of literary texts. The comparative model was constructed based on existing models, and elaborated on them, substantiating the model through textual analysis focusing on cues for irony (Clark and Gerrig 1984; Grice 1975, 1978; Haverkate 1990; Sperb...

The goal of this contribution is to examine various cases of redundancy in source literary texts and in their translations, which serve as cues for the presence of indirect meaning and lead to an ironic interpretation. Redundancy is often interpreted as a flouting of the Gricean Maxim of Quantity (Grice, 1975). However, I suggest that, under certai...