The Dubbing Translation of Humorous Audiovisual Texts - Hardcover

"This volume is a most welcome addition to the vibrant field of audiovisual translation in general, and dubbing in particular. Focusing on the translation of humour, one of the trickiest challenges in translation studies, and foregrounding the multimodal nature of audiovisual texts, the author successfully designs a heuristic model for the analysis and recontextualisation of audiovisual programmes. Written in accessible and engaging prose, this monograph is an impressive piece of scholarship that will appeal to students and researchers alike." -Professor Jorge Diaz Cintas, University College London, UK "This book presents an original 'interactive' model for the analysis and translation of audiovisual texts. It undermines accepted assumptions in that it introduces a fresh cognitive-experiential perspective to the process of rendering source scripts of various humorous types (from sitcoms to video-games) into pragmatically-equivalent target ones. Multifaceted in argument and rich in case-study illustrations, this is a stimulating exploration of the interpretation phases of 'critical analysis' and 'cognitive-semantic representation' and the rendering phase of 'pragmatic retextualisation' of the socio-cultural incongruities that characterize the visual and linguistic dimensions of such multimodal texts." -Professor Maria Grazia Guido, University of Salento, Italy

This book provides a theoretical and practical framework for researchers and practitioners who focus on the construction, interpretation and retextualisation of audiovisual texts. It defines translation as a communicative and interpretative process, with translators seen as cross-cultural mediators who make the denotative-semantic and connotative-pragmatic dimensions of source scripts accessible to target receivers, prompting equivalent perlocutionary effects, while still respecting the original illocutionary force. While existing research on audiovisual translation generally adopts a product-based perspective, examining the lexico-semantic and syntactic features of source and target versions, this book proposes an "Interactive Model", in order to explore what happens in the translators' minds, as well as the influence of the interaction between the linguistic and extralinguistic dimensions in the construction and interpretation of audiovisual texts. The application of this Model to the analysis of a corpus of humorous films, TV series and video games foregrounds the integration between the analysis of the source-text features and the knowledge of the target linguacultural backgrounds in the creation of pragmalingustic equivalent scripts. At the same time, this book also provides valuable insights into the audience's reception of these translations, by submitting close-ended and open-ended questionnaires to subjects representing empirical receivers, thus helping to evaluate the degree of linguistic and functional equivalence of target versions.