For the foreign translators of David Sedaris, the elusiveness of comedic tone is no laughing matter. Sergio Flaksman, who brought “Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim” into Brazilian Portuguese, found that in early drafts, Sedaris came off as a whiny, melodramatic wreck. After listening to the nasal deadpan of Sedaris’s radio broadcasts, Flaksman was able to contrive a kind of Brazilian surrogate whose “relentless mean humor could show its smiling fangs” in Portuguese.

Might some funny bits actually get funnier in translation? In the title story of George Saunders’s “Pastoralia,” a character is paid to impersonate a cave man at a theme park, his employers providing a freshly-killed goat to roast daily, until one morning he goes to the usual spot and finds it “goatless.” Among the many possible renderings of this made-up word, Saunders’s German translator chose ziegenleer, a lofty-sounding melding of “goat” and “void” with no exact equivalent in English.

“The German translation is accurate, but the word combination tickles some kind of orthographical, sound-receptive funny bone,” explained the Latvian translator Kaija Straumanis, the editorial director for Open Letter Books, the University of Rochester’s literature in translation press and one of the conference organizers. “The more high-minded you make it sound in your head, the funnier it gets, implying a rusted-out box into which this man is staring and seeing a severe and disconcerting lack of goat.”

Deliberately skewed translation can also lead to a kind of mischievous comedy. The game of making one language sound like another has been a verbal pastime at least since Renaissance poets managed to concoct lines that made sense in both Hebrew and Italian. The midcentury Hollywood actor Luis van Rooten revived the practice by phonetically transcribing nursery rhymes into brilliantly nonsensical French. (His “Humpty Dumpty” begins “Un petit, d’un petit” — if you’re perplexed, read the French aloud slowly.) Bilingual high jinks continue with the current YouTube craze for misheard lyrics, including a remarkably convincing misconstrual of “Carmina Burana,” whose dire invocation, “O Fortuna,” becomes the only slightly less solemn exhortation “Gopher Tuna!”

In the real world, of course, translators have a certain kind of shadowy power. Jimmy Carter learned this the hard way in Poland when his nonnative interpreter turned a perfectly wholesome remark of his into “I desire the Poles carnally.” And shortly after he left office, Carter was perplexed to find his opening anecdote in a speech to a college in Japan greeted with uproarious laughter. When he asked why the joke had gotten such an extraordinary response, he received this reply from his Japanese interpreter: “I told the audience, ‘President Carter told a funny story; everyone must laugh.’ ”

But all kidding aside, what makes a good translator of humor?

“We talk about the cerebral difficulties, but at some point you have to become an artist, and just work with what you can find,” said Roger Sedarat, an associate professor of English at Queens College who has translated the 14th-century Persian poet Hafez and the modern Iranian poet Nader Naderpour, and moderated a panel at this year’s convention on rendering the lighter side of Persian verse.

As with serious prose, it’s no coincidence that the best translators are among the most enthusiastic readers. “I feel that when the translator is laughing, the humor will manage to get across,” the Greek translator Myrsini Gana said, adding: “One of the biggest difficulties when translating David Sedaris’s humor is that you laugh so hard that it is almost impossible to concentrate.”

No matter how resourceful the translator, though, there are limits to what can be faithfully done to elicit a laugh. “You try to save as much as possible without driving yourself crazy,” said Ingo Herzke, who has rendered Shteyngart into German. But, he admitted, “More often than not you have to let a joke go.”