Subtitling and dubbing

The already challenging task translators are assigned with when translating verbal humor is further intensified when dealing with verbally expressed humor in the context of audiovisual translation. Ciaro argues that “no matter how complex issues concerning the translation of written and spoken instances of VEH [verbally expressed humour] may be, they are relatively simple when compared to the intricacy of having to translate them when they occur within a text created to be performed on screen.” Translating verbal humour in the audiovisual context is indeed a demanding process due to the fact that, in addition to the cultural and language factors, the translator's scope is also bound by the visual and audial aspect of the medium. Therefore, when it comes to rendering the humour of the source language the translator’s choice is limited by audial and visual cues which cannot be manipulated. Though, dubbing replaces source language on the soundtrack with target language, source-culture oriented visual feedback might still make a target-culture oriented translation solution impossible, and consequently make humour impossible to translate.

Viewers’ expectation that the translator remains faithful to the source text is another aspect to the translator’s delicate job of aiding the target culture in capturing the humour. While being under a variety of constrains the translator is also supposed to make the least possible changes to the source version. This feature affects subtitling where the source language and the target language are simultaneously present. While in the case of dubbing viewers awareness of a divergent or possible incorrect translation is suppressed, according to Shochat and Stam (qtd. in Jaskanen, Reality Bites 7) “subtitles offer the pretext for a linguistic game of ‘spot the error’” especially for those viewers who have a command of both languages. Consequently, the subtitler is often faced with the often impossible task to keep to the source language version and at the same time render the humour that cannot be rendered by a source-culture oriented translation solution. Finding a compromise, a solution that might function for the target language audience in a maximally similar way as the original did for the source language audience and still not deviate too much from the source language version might prove to be an especially thorny issue, and on a number of occasion an impossible task The next section investigates the way Romanian subtitlers and Hungarian dubbing translators set out to complete this demanding mission.

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