Translation of black humor in the films of Tim Burton

Abstract

The article looks into the specific features of the individual style of the American film director, screenwriter, and animator Tim Burton; it studies the Ukrainian language translation of the black humor in the animated dark fantasy film “Corpse Bride” (2005). The article investigates the multimodality of the film text, it studies the film director’s style which is based on the openness to macabre art, gothic subculture, the Victorian epoch, black humor, and the ironic attitude to death. Film text contains verbal and non-verbal elements of film language. The research outlines the basic features of film translation and the author’s criteria for creating a film text which consists of the verbal, nonverbal, and symbolic elements as well as the ways through which the author achieves the comic effect. The work analyzes the works by the authors engaged in the fields of film translation, psycholinguistics, and film production. The choice of the material is conditioned by the fact that this animated full-length film depicts the author’s style and contains a lot of examples of black humor in both verbal and nonverbal components of the film text. It also reflects the current theme of fear, helplessness and death, as well as an individual’s response to the destructive environment, using verbal and non-verbal means of black humor and irony. Macabre symbols, music and other details emphasize the atmosphere of the world of the dead. The research in the field of black humor is promising as there are multiple current examples in the media and social networks. The theme of the macabre is topical in view of its insufficient study in Ukrainian artistic and translation fields. Film translation creates a new multimodal/multimedia text that should have the same impact on the recipient of the target language and culture as it does on the recipient in the source culture and language. In addition to culturally-specific and lexical and grammatical problems of translation, there are technical issues, which are determined by the specifics of audiovisual translation, in particular, the need to adhere to the timing, know the standards of subtitling and dubbing, be able to work with culturally-specific information, apply translation strategies in order to produce a text that sounds most natural to the target audience.