Homophonic translation renders a text in one language into a near-homophonic text in another language, usually with no attempt to preserve the original meaning of the text. In one homophonic translation, for example, the English "sat on a wall" /ˈsætɒnəˈwɔːl/ is rendered as French "s'étonne aux Halles" [setɔnoɑl] (literally "is surprised at the Market"). More generally, homophonic transformation renders a text into a near-homophonic text in the same or another language: e.g., "recognize speech" could become "wreck a nice beach".
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Homophonic translation may be used to render proper nouns in a foreign language. A more elegant solution, when possible, is phono-semantic matching, which attempts to have closer semantics as well as the proper sound.
Alternatively, homophonic translation may be used for humorous purpose, as bilingual punning (macaronic language). This requires the listener or reader to understand both the surface, nonsensical translated text, as well as the source text—the surface text then sounds like source text spoken in a foreign accent.
Examples
Frayer Jerker is a homophonic translation of the French Frère Jacques (1956). Other examples of homophonic translation include some works by Oulipo (1960–), Frédéric Dard, Luis van Rooten's English-French Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames (1967), Louis Zukofsky's Latin-English Catullus Fragmenta (1969), Ormonde de Kay's English-French N'Heures Souris Rames (1980), John Hulme's German-English Morder Guss Reims: The Gustav Leberwurst Manuscript, and David Melnick's Ancient Greek-English Men in Aida (1983).
Examples of homophonic transformation include Howard L. Chace's "Ladle Rat Rotten Hut", written in "Anguish Languish" (English Language) and published in book form in 1956.
A British schoolboy example of Dog Latin:
Other names proposed for this genre include "allographic translation", "transphonation", or (in French) "traducson", but none of these is widely used.
Here is van Rooten's version of Humpty Dumpty:
The individual words are almost all correct French (with the exceptions that fallent is a form of the non-existent verb *faller and Reguennes is a hapax legomenon), and some passages follow standard syntax and are interpretable (though nonsensical), but the result is in fact not meaningful French.
Ghil'ad Zuckermann's "Italo-Hebraic Homophonous Poem" is meaningful in both Italian and Hebrew, "although it has a surreal, evocative flavour, and modernist style".
Here is another example of a sentence which has two completely different meanings if read in Latin or in Italian:
Song lyrics
Homophonic translations of song lyrics, often combined with music videos, for comic effect—also known as soramimi in Japan and mondegreen in English speaking countries—have gained popularity on the internet.