Discourse Analysis (aka. How to Ruin a Good Story)

Is it possible to explain a joke without killing it? You know, you tell a funny story and hit the punch line only to get a confused stare. Attempting a quick fix, you repeat one significant detail and then again the punch line…still no response. Here you face a cross-roads, either you repeat the story from the beginning, offer an explanation of the humorous point, or abandon ship and embrace the awkwardness. My recommendation? Well, repeating the joke could leave you in the same position with one less option the next time. Explaining the joke, 9 times out of 10 will kill it, leaving you with the token response offered only out of courtesy– “Oh yea, I get it…that’s funny.” Embracing the awkwardness is definitely the best way out! Why is it that explaining a joke destroys its humor? Because much of what makes a joke funny is the way in which it is told. The words spoken are chosen carefully, but so also are the words not spoken. Often times, the language we use leads the listener to expect one thing, yet hides the real picture until just the right moment. Telling a good joke is an art form, built on one of several different joke-telling template structures.

 

In reality, all forms of communication are built on various templates. Sermons, for example. There is the typical three-point sermon, the topical “bounce around Scripture and then add application” sermon, and the underused first-person narrative sermon. When deciding how to communicate a particular message, a preacher chooses a culturally-defined template and then shapes his message in the appropriate “church language.” The same is true of political addresses, graduation speeches, commercials, lectures to children, excuses to bosses and even the unusual way we speak to our pets.

 

All communication functions within templates (which include template-breaking features), which is why if you take a joke out of its template and put it into a different one in order to offer explanation, it dies an ugly death. Which leads us to the important principle: communicating something outside of its natural linguistic template can not only distort, but actually destroy the message. In the work of Bible translation, this is something that we must take very seriously. And so, from May 14-June 8, the Gmz translation team participated in a Narrative Discourse Analysis Workshop in Addis Ababa (that is, a workshop designed for discovering the story-telling templates in our language - Gmz).

 

In preparation for the workshop, we recorded, transcribed, and translated seven Gmz stories for analysis. Dissecting a good story sentence by sentence, word by word, quickly killed our enjoyment of the stories themselves, much like a dissected frog isn’t much fun to chase around the room. However, to someone fascinated by language, slicing open and pinning back the skin of a story opens a whole new world of discovery – discovery that would help us as we would soon be suturing up our own narratives in the translation of God’s word.

 

Overall, the workshop went well. We discovered some important things, we were further stumped by others, but all in all, we felt it was time well spent. What kinds of things did we study? Well, if you look at the picture above, you can see the white board on which each day’s topics are listed out. Sounds like a barrel of fun, doesn’t it?

 

I realize that most of those words mean very little to you, so let me give you one example from the topic of “participant tracking.” In English, I can write an ambiguous sentence, “John hit Bob and he hit me.” The ambiguity lies in the question, “who hit me?” Was it John or Bob? In English, we make the distinction with stress – “John hit Bob and he hit me.” This sentence stresses the conjunction, and the unstressed pronoun ‘he’ naturally draws the same subject from the previous verb. In other words, John is the one who hit me. If I say “John hit Bob and he hit me” stressing the pronoun signals the change in subject from the previous verb. In other words, Bob hit me. Can you hear the difference?

 

Well in Gmz, there are no stressed and unstressed pronouns, but they have another important way to mark this. Verbs in Gmz are conjugated for person so there is a marking on the verb that tells the listener who the subject is (thus making pronouns unnecessary). So, I can say “John he-hit Bob and he-hit me.” This means that John hit me because the subject of the second verb is retained from the first. If I add the unnecessary pronoun, however, it changes the participant. “John he-hit Bob and he he-hit me.” Adding the pronoun signals the listener to understand that the subject of the second verb changed from the first, meaning that it must be Bob who hit me. Looking briefly at one of our translated texts in Acts, we found at least one construction where this rule had not been applied correctly, leading to a completely wrong translation. Someone who translates word for word, or even sentence for sentence will unknowingly make these types of mistakes, which is why zooming out to study and learn the Gmz story-telling template (aka. narrative discourse) is extremely important to producing the correct translation off God’s word.