Abstract
This paper examines the dubbing of the British comedy series A Touch of Cloth into French. Building on existing descriptive theory regarding wordplay translation – particularly the model of translation techniques laid out by Delabastita (1993) – translation patterns are identified. A corpus of instances of wordplay is established, correlations are identified between particular types of wordplay and particular translation results, and a case-by-case examination is undertaken to determine how different factors impacted these results. A wide range of factors are found to contribute to the way wordplay is translated, notably: the languages at hand, the nature of the joke, and the audiovisual features the joke brings into play. Conclusions are then drawn regarding the technique likely to be employed on a given occasion and why, as well as how closely the translation can be expected to reflect the original segment.
Highlights
Wordplay – owing its effect to the structure of the language in which it originates (Delabastita, 1996, p. 127) – presents a particular challenge to translators (Chiaro, 2010; Delabastita, 1993, 1996; Schröter, 2004)
Gambier (2008) notes that a wide range of studies surrounding translational issues such as humour have focused on interlingual subtitling, often applying their findings to the characterisation of audiovisual translation (AVT) as a whole; this paper focuses on the medium of dubbing
Quantitative Results Through an examination of the techniques applied to different cases of wordplay in A Touch of Cloth (ATOC), correlations were observed between particular types of wordplay and particular translation techniques, as well as how closely the source text (ST) wordplay was rendered in the TT
Summary
Wordplay – owing its effect to the structure of the language in which it originates (Delabastita, 1996, p. 127) – presents a particular challenge to translators (Chiaro, 2010; Delabastita, 1993, 1996; Schröter, 2004). The singular challenge of translating wordplay in an audiovisual context is addressed, by means of a case study – the dubbing of the British comedy show A Touch of Cloth into French. Building on Delabastita’s (1993) model for the translation of wordplay, a framework of translation techniques is established, and an attempt is made to identify correlations between these techniques and particular types of wordplay, as well as determining how closely different types of wordplay tend to be rendered in the target text (TT). An analysis is made of the ways in which this medium’s particular characteristics – substituting source text audio with audible speech in the target language, while maintaining all of the original text’s visual features – come into play in the translation of wordplay
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