The strategies of humour transfer in subtitling and their effects on humour response

The translation of humour is a subject that has been widely dealt with in the academic world, but it seems that research concerning the translation of humour in audio visual products is lacking. Subtitling being a form of intersemiotic translation, its specificities make it challenging for the translator to come up with a relevant translation of a given instance of humour, and theoretical guidelines or translation strategies regarding the audio visual translation of humour are often missing.

From early on, the translation of humour has been separated into two main categories: humour that is translatable, and humour that supposedly is not. This differentiation between these two main types of humour and their translatability has laid the path for future theorists, which has left us with a wide range of forms of humour that have been labelled as theoretically untranslatable, notably culture specific and verbal humour. In practice, however, translators do manage to translate such instances of humour, and it is therefore on these two types of humour that this research focuses on.

This study takes into account a certain area of audience perception, that is how the audience perceives a translated instance of humour, and how this differs from the original audience perception. The aim of this research is to identify how a subtitler can recreate a humour response that is as close as the one created in the original work being translated, yet in a culturally different audience. 

Xavier Bridault, PhD Candidate, University of Edinburgh