#translation is fucking art
The best joke ever translated into Spanish is the translation of “Much Ado About Nothing” by Shakespeare
Because in Spanish, the title is Mucho ruido y pocas nueces
This translation excellently preserves the double entendre in the English. In English, “Much ado about nothing” on the surface means what you’d expect, “making a big deal out of nothing”. But in Shakespeare’s time, “nothing” was slang for female genitals… the idea being they had “nothing” there.
So the English double entendre is that it could mean “a lot of fuss about nothing important” or “a lot of fuss about/over women”
The Spanish translation is mucho ruido y pocas nueces which translates literally as “a lot of noise and few nuts”. The general meaning would be implied as “you’re trying to get the nuts to fall off the tree so you hit it a lot”, aka “a lot of effort and little reward” which captures the first meaning.
And of course, “a lot of noise and no nuts” has dual meanings in Spanish. Because la nuez could be “nut” (specifically “walnut”), or also testicle, AND la nuez could also mean “Adam’s apple”
In that case it’s, “a lot of noise and no nuts” or “a lot of noise and no Adam’s apples”, referring to women.
And so both meanings of the joke get translated pretty equally well
