ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book focuses on category of largely intended humour, where a communicator's intended meanings, reconstructed from his/her verbal and non-verbal behaviour, causes the receiver to perceive humour intention and to evaluate it spontaneously. The dearth of serious work on humour translation in translation studies suggests that humour translation is qualitatively different from 'other types' of translation and, consequently, one cannot write about humour translation in the same way one writes about other types of translation. However, the conceptual complexity of humour can be analyzed and appreciated; its analysis may help scholars and trainers alike to see structures in effects that are fuzzy but still bear strong, to understand the ways in which these effects are encoded in language. Some humour researchers are able to conceptualize intentional states to such an extent that quantification and qualitative richness of categories no longer exclude each other.
