Abstract
Translating humour has traditionally been considered to be a problematic area for translators. This topic becomes even thornier when examined in the context of audiovisual translation, mainly because of the technical constraints imposed by this type of translation. This article presents the results of an analysis which was focused on the material from the TV series House M.D. and compared the source text in English with the Spanish dubbed version and Polish voice-over version. The article presents the identified strategies of translating conversational humour in audiovisual context. Its main objective was not to demonstrate superiority of the applied audiovisual mode over the other one but to expose the differences between two target versions.
Highlights
The complex phenomenon of humour has never ceased to inspire interest of philosophers starting from Plato, Kant and Henri Bergson and has traditionally been considered to be a problematic area of Translation Studies
The research covers humour translation for audiovisual purposes from the point of view which has not been explored in the Translating conversational humour
Conclusion translating humour is considered to be a problematic aspect of translation, we identified a clear trend to maintain conversational humour in both target texts
Summary
The complex phenomenon of humour has never ceased to inspire interest of philosophers starting from Plato, Kant and Henri Bergson and has traditionally been considered to be a problematic area of Translation Studies. The analysis involved different translation modes (dubbing and voice-over) and different target languages (Spanish and Polish) It was based on 122 humorous scenes from the following 6 episodes of medical drama House M.D: 1. Dynel (2009: 1284) distinguished two types of verbal humour: jokes and conversational humour and focused her attention on the second category. According to Zabalbaescoa (2001: 258) there are seven joke types: international joke, national culture and institution joke, national sense of humour joke, language-dependent joke, visual joke, paralinguistic joke and complex joke. The total number of 122 scenes were examined in order to identify the source of humour in the target text and possible translation problems. Once the humour source and possible translation problems were identified we focused on target texts: Spanish and Polish. The humour loss is complete as the humour potential was ignored by both translators
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