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An Analysis of Puns Translated for the Polish Voiced-Over Version of the American TV Series Modern Family

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An Analysis of Puns Translated for the Polish Voiced-Over Version of the American TV Series Modern Family University of Amsterdam Graduate School of Humanities MA program in Linguistic: Translation An analysis of puns translated for the Polish voiced-over version of the American TV series Modern Family. Aleksandra Slawuta Student number: 11107448 Supervisor: dhr. dr. Eric Metz Amsterdam 2017 1 Abstract This paper covers the subject of translatability of humor in audiovisual translation. Humor is always difficult to translate not only because of the possible cultural differences between the speakers of a source and target languages but also because everyone has different taste and is laughing at different jokes. This corpus-based thesis is analyzing the specific kind of jokes: puns. They are very language-specific, therefore difficult to translate. Nonetheless, there are certain strategies used to convey the humorous effect to other language. In this paper I am analyzing 80 puns found in the first and second season of the American TV series Modern Family and their Polish equivalents from the voiced-over translation. Basing on the theories coined by Hausmann, Delabastita, Newmark and Nash I am aiming to determine whether translation strategies used to translate puns manage to deliver funny rendering in the target language (Polish). Moreover, I am investing the possible reasons why, in many cases, the translation did not deliver a funny rendering. 2 Table of contents List of figures ................................................................................................................................ 5 1. Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 6 1.1. Aim of the paper ...........................................................................................................................6 1.2. Methodology and material ...........................................................................................................7 1.3. Research questions and hypothesis .......................................................................................... 10 2. Audiovisual translation ............................................................................................................ 11 2.1. Audiovisual translation – definitions ......................................................................................... 11 2.2. Types of audiovisual translation ................................................................................................ 14 2.2.1. Subtitles ............................................................................................................................... 15 2.2.2. Dubbing ............................................................................................................................... 16 2.2.3. Voice-over ........................................................................................................................... 17 2.3. The audiovisual landscape in Poland ......................................................................................... 18 2.4. Constraints and criticism of voice-over ..................................................................................... 20 3. Pun in translation .................................................................................................................... 21 3.1. Definition of pun ........................................................................................................................ 21 3.2.(Un)translatability of puns .......................................................................................................... 22 3.3. Constraints in translating puns .................................................................................................. 24 3.4. Types of puns according to Hausmann and Nash...................................................................... 25 3.5. Delabastita`s translation strategies for puns............................................................................. 28 3.5.1. S.T.Pun > T.T.Pun ................................................................................................................. 28 3.5.2. Pun > Non-Pun..................................................................................................................... 29 3.5.3. Pun > Punoid ....................................................................................................................... 29 3.5.4. Pun > Zero ........................................................................................................................... 29 3.5.5. Direct copy: Pun S.T. = Pun T.T. ........................................................................................... 29 3.5.6. Transference: Pun S.T. = Pun T.T. ........................................................................................ 30 3.5.7. Addition: Non Pun > Pun ..................................................................................................... 30 3.5.8. Addition (New textual material): Zero > Pun ...................................................................... 30 3.5.9. Editorial Techniques ............................................................................................................ 30 3.6. Puns in movies and TV series..................................................................................................... 31 3.7. Successful and unsuccessful translation of puns ....................................................................... 31 3.8. About the TV series Modern Family .......................................................................................... 32 4. Analysis ................................................................................................................................... 33 4.1. Puns in the corpus ..................................................................................................................... 34 4.1.1. Homonymic puns................................................................................................................. 35 3 4.1.2. Paronymic puns ................................................................................................................... 39 4.1.3. Homophonic puns ............................................................................................................... 42 4.1.4. Portmanteaux ...................................................................................................................... 44 4.2. Successful and unsuccessful renderings. ................................................................................... 46 4.3. Horizontal and vertical puns ...................................................................................................... 47 4.4. Compensation strategies in the corpus ..................................................................................... 49 5. Conclusions and perspective for future investigation ................................................................ 49 5.1. Conclusions ................................................................................................................................ 49 5.2. Further investigation ................................................................................................................. 51 6. Bibliography ............................................................................................................................ 52 6.1. Primary bibliography ................................................................................................................. 52 6.2. Secondary bibliography ............................................................................................................. 52 6.3. Dictionaries ................................................................................................................................ 54 6.4. Internet sources ......................................................................................................................... 55 7. Appendix ................................................................................................................................. 55 4 List of figures Figure 1: Luyken`s table of the two main methods of Language Transfer currently in use .............. 15 Figure 2: Categories of puns .............................................................................................................. 28 Figure 3: Types of the English puns ................................................................................................... 35 Figure 4: Translation strategies used per type .................................................................................. 35 Figure 5: Strategies used ................................................................................................................... 46 Figure 6: Renderings .......................................................................................................................... 47 Figure 7: Successful renderings per category .................................................................................... 47 Figure 8: Unsuccessful renderings per category .............................................................................. 48 Figure 9: Horizontal vs vertical puns ................................................................................................. 48 Figure 10: Horizontal/vertical puns - strategies ................................................................................ 49 5 1. Introduction
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