When When Contagion Sounds Hilarious

Word-for-Word Translation as a Means for Fun

Abstract

Contact between languages has always occurred. There is a location where the contact mainly takes place: it is translation. More specifically, the translator’s mind. When the source text is not re-elaborated in the translator’s mind, when the source language’s elements are not kept apart from the target language, contagion takes place.

Contagion is an effect of contact, as Covid-19 pandemic has been teaching us over the past two years or so. Bodies need to be kept separate in order to avoid contagion. Devices shall be used to avoid contamination. This is supposed to work for physical contact and subsequent contagion. What happens in the translator’s mind?

The present essay aims at analyzing the “expressionary” designed by “Rome is More,” a linguo-cultural experiment carried out and promoted mainly on the social media to make English speakers get in contact with linguo-cultural elements of the Roman dialect.