Subtitling Referential Humour in Sitcoms
Subtitling Referential Humour in Sitcoms

Summary/Abstract: While most discussions about humour in translation have focused mainly on the idea of its untranslatability, there are studies that concentrate on highlighting the variables which can influence the translation of humour. Starting from the assumption that humour translation is feasible, despite inherent losses, the present paper tries to focus on the factors influencing the process of translating referential humour in the audiovisual context. The first part of the paper represents an attempt to define the field of referential humour and delimit it from that of strictly verbal humour, inasmuch as this is possible. Then, on the basis of a corpus containing scenes extracted from several American situational comedies (sitcoms) and their Romanian translation, it is suggested that, among factors such as the semiotic complexity of a television programme, the shared knowledge of source and target audience, the overall quality of the outcome also depends on the experience and talent of the translator.

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