In the literature on the translation of humour, much attention is devoted to questions relating to its (un)translatability, or at least to the difficulties involved in its translation. Translation shifts can be regarded as a negative effect of a translation process, but there are various situations when such shifts are simply impossible to avoid, e.g. in the case of humour translation.Furthermore, as far as audiovisual texts are concerned, the degree of difficulty increases considerably because of their inherent characteristics, such as time or space limitation in dialogues and scenes. The paper explores the notion of shifts of meaning in humour translation and examines the Italian versions (dubbing and subtitling) of the well known film Little Fockers (Paul Weitz, USA 2010), through a comparative analysis based on Chiaro’s (2004) method which allows to shed light on the cultural factors which are behind the choices of the elements for translating humour. The aim of this study is to prove that shifts of meaning in the case of humour translation in Little Fockers are unavoidable and even desirable, and that they result from the specificity of dubbing and humour translation.Various aspects connected with ‘alterity’ in the discourse of humour translation are described, and shifts of meaning in the Italian translations of Little Fockers are discussed.They clearly illustrate that innovative thinking, and creative decision-making on the part of translators, can result in a successful translation, even with a culturally bound element in a contextually bound medium.Anyone who has ever tried to translate an English joke into another language will know that it is no easy task [...]Similarly, when a joke in a foreign language is translated into English, results tend to be disastrous. Jokes, it would seem, travel badly.Chiaro, 1992:77

Little Fockers and AV Translated Humour

LEOTTA, PAOLA CLARA
2016-01-01

Abstract

In the literature on the translation of humour, much attention is devoted to questions relating to its (un)translatability, or at least to the difficulties involved in its translation. Translation shifts can be regarded as a negative effect of a translation process, but there are various situations when such shifts are simply impossible to avoid, e.g. in the case of humour translation.Furthermore, as far as audiovisual texts are concerned, the degree of difficulty increases considerably because of their inherent characteristics, such as time or space limitation in dialogues and scenes. The paper explores the notion of shifts of meaning in humour translation and examines the Italian versions (dubbing and subtitling) of the well known film Little Fockers (Paul Weitz, USA 2010), through a comparative analysis based on Chiaro’s (2004) method which allows to shed light on the cultural factors which are behind the choices of the elements for translating humour. The aim of this study is to prove that shifts of meaning in the case of humour translation in Little Fockers are unavoidable and even desirable, and that they result from the specificity of dubbing and humour translation.Various aspects connected with ‘alterity’ in the discourse of humour translation are described, and shifts of meaning in the Italian translations of Little Fockers are discussed.They clearly illustrate that innovative thinking, and creative decision-making on the part of translators, can result in a successful translation, even with a culturally bound element in a contextually bound medium.Anyone who has ever tried to translate an English joke into another language will know that it is no easy task [...]Similarly, when a joke in a foreign language is translated into English, results tend to be disastrous. Jokes, it would seem, travel badly.Chiaro, 1992:77
2016
translation shifts, humour, Little Fockers, audiovisual translation
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11769/19813
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