SUBTITLING HUMOUR - A JOURNEY ACROSS CULTURES

Humour, a multidisciplinary field of study, has been the focus of interest of many academics, ranging from Anthropology to film studies. Audiovisual translation (AVT) and most notably subtitling is one of the branches of Translation Studies that has seen dramatic developments in recent years, at least as far as the theoretical background is concerned. Subtitling is in its own a challenge for the translator, first of all because it proposes a different type of text: the audiovisual text entails inter-semiotic elements in a triadic structure: image / word / sound. In AVT humour management is limited by technical, linguistic and cultural constraints. Moreover, the sub titler has to make proof of humour awareness and humorous complicity, that is to understand the joke in its source culture context and obtain a roughly similar humorous effect upon the target culture audience by overcoming all the 'impossibilities' he might come across during this journey from one culture to another. Humour is universal when regarded as a cognitive and psychological process, yet it is definitely culture-specific, hence the translator/subtitler has to manipulate culture-specific references in such a way as to ensure dynamic equivalence. Whether domesticating or foreignizing in its approach, any form of AVT is organically related to both national identities and national stereotypes. The transmission of cultural values in screen translation remains one of the most pressing areas of research at the border between Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.