Subtitling cultural humour in the Spanish comedy Paquita Salas

Abstract

Undoubtedly, audiovisual products display images and narrate a storyline which are always framed in a specific culture. Nowadays, movies, series and documentaries have become a perfect diffuser of a great variety of cultures throughout the world. This cultural diversity poses a great challenge to translators, as they must identify the presence of cultural references in every semiotic aspect of the audiovisual text. Furthermore, translators must bear in mind the audience targeted, as the ultimate purpose of audiovisual translation is to communicate a message to recipients from different socio-cultural backgrounds. When translated audiovisual products reach other cultures, some concepts might not be understood or interpreted in the same way, as the message and the communicative purpose were originated within a language and cultural framework with the objective of producing a certain feeling on the audience. However, this effect may vary in a different language and culture community. This cultural gap increases when dealing with humour, as this is a form of human communication sculpted within a specific culture which may be ethnocentric and be based on national identities, cultural jokes, puns and stereotypes. This study aims to analyse what occurs when the assumption is that the audience do not share such a cultural background and the cultural aspects seem to be “untranslatable”, so translators must adapt the text in order to create a new form of humour. Moreover, the study will pose the constant debate on audiovisual translation: whether to domesticate or to foreignize cultural humour in order to provoke the laughs amongst the audience. When dealing with subtitles, translators wonder to what extent humour can be adapted and if a creativetranslation might be suitable or not, as they must not forget that subtitling is a type of “vulnerable translation” (Díaz-Cintas & Remael, 2009, p. 56) which is subject to the audience’s judgement. Then, this study will analyse some humorous fragments selected from a Spanish comedy with the purpose of identifying the translation strategies applied and determining if the transfer of cultural humour is possible, as well as the realization of a creative translation.