ABSTRACT
Smart technology has simplified communication between people around the world in a way that would have been unimaginable even as recently as recently as 2010. A consequence of this newly found ease of communication between speakers of different languages, who are separated only by a keyboard and a screen, has led to the strengthening of the role of English as a common and international language. It therefore follows that many instances of humour online appear to originate in English. In fact, the prominence and social standing of English today makes it the primary language of online humour by default. Internet memes, which seem to have overtaken traditional jokes as humorous tropes in everyday interaction, mostly come from Western sources, or more precisely from templates based on fragments of US culture. It thus follows that more English humour undergoes translation into other languages, and therefore goes viral, than vice versa. It is unusual for humour from other languages/cultures to go viral when the sources of global humour epidemics are principally disseminated from English language sources. The verbal and cultural options upon which online humour is created are identical to those that exist in the real world and so are translational strategies. There is no reason not to translate humour in languages other than English, but at present there does not appear to be the will to do so.
