Linguistica Inglese II, Dispense di Linguistica Inglese

Scarica Linguistica Inglese II e più Dispense in PDF di Linguistica Inglese solo su Docsity! LINGUISTICA INGLESE II INTRODUCTION: WHAT IS HUMOUR? Individuals make great use of humour in their everyday life and conversations. However, it has been highly debated within many fields yet none of them were able to reach a collective opinion. It is therefore not surprising that Humour Studies is an interdisciplinary field that covers anthropological, psychological, philosophical and linguistic research. Humour is a multifaceted, relative and idiosyncratic phenomenon that varies according to culture, historical context but also according to our mood. It is a mostly human phenomenon although it can occur within the animal kingdom as well and its purposes are related to group- bonding and interpersonal interaction. To sum up, humour can be seen as a linguistic, semiotic, cognitive and social phenomenon that many of us experimented. There’s not a unified definition of humour and that’s why it has been vividly discussed by many people throughout time: • At the turn of the twentieth century, in his essay “On Humour”, Luigi Pirandello concluded that the very essence of humour cannot be captured due to its complex nature but it can be understood by considering its many aspects; • Victor Raskin claims that ‘the ability to appreciate and enjoy humour is universal and shared by all people even if the kinds of humour they favour differ widely, one way or another’ which sees humour as an ‘universal human trait’; • Guidi (2017) pointed out that humour is considered a universal, partly natural and partly acquired, mode of communication; To this end, Raskin described ‘an individual occurrence of a funny stimulus as the humour act’ which is highly influenced by markers such as voice pitch, pauses, facial expressions and mimic moves also known as paraverbal texts to mark humorous discourse. They’re different from the irony factors because these are essential to signal the irony intent of an utterance whether the former ones can be removed. It can be stimulated and supported (Hay, 2001) in different ways, such as: • Contributing more humour (overall jokes to play along); • Echoing the words of the speaker; • Offering sympathy or contradicting self-deprecating humour; The participants in conversational exchanges entailing humor can establish and continuosly negotiate it via a series of strategies. These strategies may depend on personal choice or style while others are socially imposed. The jocular mode is proposed by the speaker and may or may not be adopted by the listeners. As Whalen and Pexman (2017) state ‘one can demonstrate comprehension of the initial remark and partecipate jointly in the pragmatic functions of humorous discourse’. The most debated of all humour markers remains laughter. Laughing also has positive effects on our health on a medical point of view. It also has a positive effect on our moods in terms of contrasting depression. However, Raskin suggested that ‘humour usually causes laughter’ but ‘humour holds no monopoly on laughter’. Therefore there have been many considerations from scholars according to this connection: • Chiaro and Nash suggested that humour and laughter have an implicit relationship • Palmer and Morreal see laughter as an integral part of humour • By contrast, Oring talks about laughter and humour as a separate phenomena that are however linked. For his part, Norrick considered laughter as a parameter that can signal the presence of humour in the text but it is a view that makes no claim as to the inherent funniness of the text under scrutiny. However, he also stated that laughing establishes relationships among the participants in a conversation but some people may choose not to respond and to distance themselves from the humorous situation (ex. it may due to the influence that social norms have on the audience when it comes to taboo topics). Attardo (1994) points out that there are five reasons why humour and laughter cannot be considered directly related because: 1. Laughter can be provoked by other causes such as hallucinogens, tickling which means laughing is not necessarily caused by humour only; 2. Laughter may serve other purposes such as embarrassment or happiness; 3. Laughter is not directly connected to the intensity of humour as some people may perceive the joke differently and therefore appreciate it differently; 4. Humour may elicit a laugh in some people and only a smile in others; 5. Smiles and laughter can be simulated staged thus requiring interpretation. This last point connects Trouvain and Troung’s consideration about staged laughter (as in the case of music, opera and/or in group exercise as a stress relief) while others may have a pathology, known as risus sardonicus. Moreover, Chovanec has studied laughter in non-humorous texts (i.e documentaries) and found it can also be a reaction to experiences such as failure, success, disbelief and disgust. As for laughter, it may be safe to suggest that humour and laughter can be seen as distinct phenomena which are connected. As a matter of fact, many suggested that laughing is merely a form of exaggerated smiling. Laughing is therefore a social phenomenon but people often smile when they are reading a book or having a thought. Although laughter is usually associated with joy, perpetrators of violent acts have also been known to exhibit menacing smiles or to laugh demonically. Laughter can therefore be considered as one of the ways human beings may (un)consciously respond to humour, the latter being a broader phenomenon. Methodologically, laughter can at least establish connection. Humour can be seen as whatever a social group defines as such- Attardo Attardo identifies two main problems with Raskin’s theory: 1. Its applicability seems to be limited to short humorous texts such as jokes, despite the fact that humour is also known to be present in longer texts such as short stories; 2. On the other hand, this theory seems to fail to distinguish between verbal humour and referential humour; Attardo has then developed the General Theory of Verbal Humour to offer an analytical tool for the linguistic investigation of humour at large accounting for both the verbal and referential levels of this phenomenon. He proposed five knowledge resources that are requirements of a humorous text which are organized as a hierarchical structure so that each of them determines and influences the following one: 1. Script opposition; 2. Logical mechanism: it explains how two scripts are brought together (i.e by juxtaposition, ground reversal, cratylism= wordplay) 3. The situation: describes the context; 4. The target: defines the “butt” of the joke; 5. The narrative strategy: it’s responsible for the organization of the text and for its efficiency (dialogue, figure of speech, narrative aspects); 6. The language: it contains the information regarding the verbalization of the text; The most important distinction Attardo has made is the one between jab lines (jokes occurring within the text) and punch lines (occurring at the end of the text). Attardo has also supported the idea that the mechanism of humour creation might be related to the Incongruity- Resolution Model (IR) which states that the hearer first understands the jokes according to the linguistic cues and the script they activate. The punch line forces the receiver to detect the incongruity and then reinterpret the linguistic cues according to another script, which is in opposition to the one that activated the joke. If applied to the GTVH model, the Script opposition is the parameter that reveals the incongruity while the Logical Mechanism is the parameter that resolves it. The theorical slant of these humour theories is not only semantic but also pragmatic. However, Raskin and Attardo have both held divergent opinions on this: • Raskin observed that jokes subvert the four maxims of Grice, especially the ‘bona-fide’ one since a speaker who utters a joke cannot respect it if they want their joke to be effective. Therefore, he proposes the paradox of the ‘non-bona-fide’ communication mode in which the hearer will not expect the speaker to tell the truth; • Attardo further adds the suspension of disbelief in order to enjoy the humour of the text since ‘jokes are built precisely to mislead the hearer/reader into believing one thing only to switch that interpretation around at the right time’; However, it’s unconceivable even to attempt a complete overview of the many studies in different fields that have applied of the GTVH to various instances of humorous texts. Many scholars have even used the GTVH to detect potentially humorous non-linguistic data such as Canestrari who suggested the inclusion of a Meta-Knowledge Resource to account for verbal, non-verbal (expressions) and paraverbal (voice, tone, laughter) are signals of the speaker’s humorous intent. Gérin (2013) has employed the GTVH to detect the humour in visual art thus proposing the redefining of the Target Knowledge Resource so that it can distinguish between the butt of the joke that is visually represented and the targeted public or ideal viewer of the image. For her part, Tsakona (2009) has instead explored how the verbal and non-verbal texts are jointly used to create humour by analyzing a series of newspaper cartoons and demonstrated how humour can be the result of the interaction of the language and/or the image. Consequently, cartoons become multi-layered compositions made up of one or more Script Oppositions. However, the GTVH has also attracted a good deal of criticism such as Clopicki’s since he stated that this system does apply to longer texts while highlighting the fact that this theory does not seem to apply for other entities such as characters, places, objects and events. From a pragmatic standpoint, Chovance and Tsakona (2018) have remarked that the GTVH does not account for the reception, evaluation and reaction to humorous texts by their audience or interactants in general. As for humour translation, a number of scholars have attempted to apply the GTVH to their investigations. It has been proven to be a powerful tool in detecting shifts between original and translated humour. Further analysis have shown that Script Oppositions, Target and Logical Mechanism are those that are more likely to differ during the transfer of a text across language and culture. CONVERSATIONAL HUMOUR The relevance of context is pivotal to understanding humour. Sack is the most prominent proponent of the framework that helps to comprehend how people construct a conversation and build social order through talk. In other words, people engaging in potentially humorous conversations except everyone to contribute. Therefore, Sack focuses on how punning and wordplay are exploited to this end: punning in conversation is mainly possible because the interlocutors exploit the literal and idiomatic meaning of what he calls “proverbials”, or “formulaic expressions”. In his attempt to continue Sacks’s work, Sherzer suggests that puns are likely to be found at the end of an exchange because they are based on proverbials whose double meaning can be exploited to sum up a topic and create cohesion. Attardo (1994) has criticized Sherzer’s approach because it mainly focuses on the playful nature of language. According to Attardo, language play is not humorous per se, even though humour is a playful linguistic mode. He has also explained that scholars who analyse humour in conversation distinguish between canned and conversational (or situational) jokes. The first ones are defined as jokes that have already been used by other speakers in several situations and are available in books or collections of jokes. The second ones occur spontaneously in conversation and may be triggered by a given situation. Attardo makes clear that these two classes can overlap. Attardo has also pointed out that, unlike conversational jokes, canned jokes require and introduction but are usually decontextualized. Nonetheless, conversational jokes can sometimes exploit a part of the previous discourse and build on it, while canned jokes cannot. Therefore, the distinction between canned and conversational jokes cannot be clear-cut. FUNCTIONS OF HUMOUR IN CONVERSATION “Joking allows us to manipulate talk and participants in various way”- Norrick Norrick has further claimed that wordplay and punning can be used in conversation to challenge, test or attack the interlocutor(s) and, at the same time, to show the speaker’s wit. He has also studied the use of anecdotes as they help to promote a positive self-image and can present an amusing scene which calls for the listeners’ reaction. Lastly, Norrick claims that conversational humour among friends usually aims to entertain and create in-group bonding rather than expressing the audience’s or the speaker’s superiority. Using humour appropriately is an important aspect of signaling group membership and establishing boundaries among different groups (Schnurr and Plester, 2017). Tannen (1984) highlights the fact that people display peculiar ways of creating humour, which she defines as their “brand” of humour, their personal style in joking, that can also relate to the construction of a comedian’s comic persona in stand-up comedy as well as for characterization purposes in comedy TV series. Antonopoulou and Sifianou (2003) have also explored instances of humour that do not aim to cause offence. Sometimes, the receiver of a potentially aggressive pun may utter another potentially offensive comment in reply. However, the friendly context within which these exchanges take place does not disrupt the normal flow of the conversation thus proving the flexibility of humour production and perception. HUMOUR IN COMEDY Drawing on Attardo’s five categories of text types (text with no humour; text with a final punch line; text with some episodic instances of humour; texts made up of jab lines and a punch line only; texts having a series of humorous instances and punch lines throughout), Tsakona (2007) suggested a continuum of the genres of humour: a) Humour as an obligatory feature of the genres produced predominantly for the amusement of the audience (e.g. jokes, comedies, cartoons, stand-up comedy); b) Humour as an optional but expected feature of a genre that may often include humour and may aim, among other things, at creating a humorous effect (e.g. conversational narratives, literary texts, advertisements, birthday cards); c) Humour as an optional but unexpected feature of the genre – in genres where humour may occasionally occur yet is not normally or always expected (e.g. business negotiations, news reports, newspaper articles); d) Humour as an atypical feature of the genre – genres where humour hardly ever (or never) occurs (religious texts, court decisions, funeral speeches); Other scholars find that Attardi’s theory aims to preserve sameness rather than funniness. He claims that translating a joke by retaining the Knowledge Resources does not guarantee similar potential humour in the TT. As far as AVT is concerned, translators may employ a certain degree of “modifications” and “freedom” of functional manipulation translators that may manipulate the text via a number of strategies that help the TT to retain the humorous function of the original language. THE CONCEPT OF TRANSLATION (T.STUDIES, CAP 1’) The English term ‘translation’ was first attested around 1340 and it probably derives from Old French translation or more directly from the Latin translation, itself coming from the participle of the verb ‘transferre’. In the field of languages, translation today has several meanings such as the general subject field or phenomenon, the final product or the process. When it comes to the process of translation, it involves the changing of an original written text (ST) in the original verbal language (SL) into a written text (TT) in a different verbal language (TL). The traditional ST-TT configuration is the most prototypical of ‘interlingual translation’, one of the three categories of translation described by the Russo-American structuralist Roman Jakobson (1896). These definitions draw on semiotics, the general science of communication through signs and signs systems and they are: • Intralingual translation: it is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language and it would occur when we produce a summary or otherwise rewrite a text in the same language; • Intersemiotic translation: it is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of non-verbal sign systems and it occurs when a written text is translated into a different mode, such as music, film or painting; • Interlingual translation: it is an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language and it has been the traditional focus of translation studies; Sandra Halverson (1999) claims that translation can be better considered as a prototype classification and that there are basic core features that we associate with a prototypical translation and other translational forms which lie on the periphery. By contrast, Maria Tymoczko discusses the very different words and metaphors for ‘translation’ in other cultures, indicative of a conceptual orientation where the goal of close lexical fidelity to an original may not therefore be shared, certainly in the practice of translation of sacred and literary texts. The study of translation as an academic subject only really began in the second half of the twentieth century. In the English-speaking world, this discipline is known as ‘translation studies’ thanks to James S. Holmes who also describes it as the concern for ‘the complex problems clustered around the phenomenon of translating and translations’. Nowadays, they have become more prevalent since there has been a vast expansion in specialized translating and interpreting programs at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. These programs are oriented towards training future professional commercial translators and interpreters. The past decades have also seen a proliferation of conferences, books and journals on translation in many languages (i.e Babel, Meta, TTR and many others). As the number of publications has increased, so has the demand for general and analytical instruments such as anthologies, databases, encyclopedias and introductory texts. Lastly, international organizations have also prospered and they brought together national associations of translators (i.e The Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs). AN EARLY HISTORY OF THE DISCIPLINE While the practice of translation is long established, the study of the field developed into an academic discipline only in the latter part of the twentieth century. Before that, translation had often been relegated to an element of language learning in secondary schools in many countries had come to be dominated by what was known as ‘grammar-translation’ and centered around the study of the grammatical rules and structures of the foreign language by translating the structures being studied. Grammar- translation therefore fell into increasing disrepute with the rise of alternative forms of language teaching such as the ‘direct method’ and the ‘communicative approach’, which stressed students’ natural capacity to learn language and attempts to replicate ‘authentic’ language-learning conditions in the classroom. This led to the abandoning of translation in language learning. In 1960s USA, literary translation was promoted by the translation workshop content. It was intended as a platform for the introduction of new translations into the target culture and for the discussion of the finer principles of the translation process and of understanding a text. Running parallel to this approach was that of comparative literature, where it studied and compared transnationally and transculturally. Another area in which translation became the subject of research was contrastive linguistic, which studies the similarities and differences between two languages (1930-onwards). The more systematic approach to the study of translation began around 1950s and 1960s which marked out the territory of the ‘scientific investigation of translation’. THE HOLMES/TOURY MAP James Holmes’s ‘The Name and Nature of translation studies’ is generally accepted as the founding statement for the field. Holmes drew attention to the limitations imposed at the time because translation research, lacking a home of its own, was dispersed across older disciplines. Crucially, Holmes put forward an overall framework, describing what translation studies covers and it was later presented by Gideon Toury. As we can see, he divided translation studies in ‘pure’ and ‘applied’. The objectives of the first one are: the description of the phenomena of translation (descriptive theory) and the establishment of general principles to explain and predict such phenomena (theoretical theory). The latter is divided into: • General: he refers to writings that seek to describe or account for every type of translation and to make generalizations that will be relevant for translation as a whole; • Partial: theoretical studies according to the parameters described below. The first branch is known as descriptive translation studies and is divided in: • Product-oriented: Holmes examines existing translations as it may involve the description or analysis of a single ST-TT pair or a comparative analysis of several TTs of the same ST (into one or more TLs); • Function-oriented: Holmes means the description of the ‘function’ in the recipient socio-cultural situation and therefore see it as a study of contexts rather than texts’; • Process-oriented: Holmes is concerned with the psychology of translation, i.e it is concerned with trying to find out what happens in the mind of a translator by working on cognitive perspective includes protocols; The results of DTS research can be fed into the theoretical branch to evolve either a general theory of translation or, more likely, partial theories of translation ‘restricted’ according to: • Medium-restricted theories subdivide according to translation by machines and humans and if they’re working alone or as an aid to the human translator, to whether the human translation is written or spoken and to whether spoken translation is consecutive or simultaneous; • Area-restricted theories are restricted to specific languages or groups of languages and/or cultures and notes that language-restricted theories are closely related to work in contrastive linguistics and stylistics; • Rank-restricted theories are linguistic theories that have been restricted to a level of (normally) the word or sentence. At the time, Holmes was writing, there was already a trend towards text linguistics, i.e analysis at the level of the text; • Text-type restricted theories look at discourse types and genres (i.e literary, business and technical translation) and this kind of approach came to prominence with the work of Reiss and Vermeer; • Time-restricted is self-explanatory, referring to theories and translations limited according to specific time frames and periods; • Problem-restricted theories may refer to certain problems such as equivalence or to a wider question of whether so-called ‘universals’ of translation exist; The ‘applied’ branch of Holmes’s framework concerns applications to the practice of translation. It is true that translation studies have in some places been colonized by the attractiveness of academical teaching programs and this also worsened the artificial gap between practice and theory. This ignores the fact that the practice of translation is an invaluable, not to say essential, experience for the translation theorist and trainer. The volume ‘New Tendencies in Translation Studies’ set out a concerted attempt to bring together and evaluate research methodologies, which have evolved and become more sophisticated, although there is a considerable divergence on methodology as translation studies has moved from the study of words to text to sociocultural context to the working practices of the translators themselves. TRANSLATION THEORY BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (T. STUDIES, CAP 2) Up until the second half of the twentieth century, western translation theory seemed locked in what George Steiner (1998) calls a ‘sterile’ debate over translation in what Newmark calls ‘the pre-linguistics period of translation’. The distinction between ‘word-for-word’ and ‘sense- for-sense’ translation goes back to Cicero, Horace and Saint Jerome. Literal translation is therefore seen as a type of translation that adheres closely to the surface structures of the ST message, both in terms of semantics and syntax. Free translation (or oblique translation) is seen as a type of translation that attempts to translate the meaning of the word within its context and within target language requirements. The roman Marcus Tullius Cicero outlined his approach to translation in ‘De optimo genere oratorum’ where he defines himself an orator rather than an interpreter, which is often read by translation studies as being the literal translator opposed to the orator that tried to produce a speech that moved the listeners. The disparagement of word-for-word translation came from others as well, such as poet Horace, who underlines the goal of producing an aesthetically pleasing and creative poetic text in the TL in his Ars Poetica. Thus, Saint Jerome cites the authority of Cicero’s approach to justify his own Latin revision and translation of the Christian Bible commissioned by Pope Damasus (395) later to become known as the Latin Vulgate. He therefore openly admitted that his translation rendered ‘sense-for-sense’. The same concerns have been represented in other rich and ancient translation traditions such as in China and the Arab world. Hung and Pollard used similar terms when describing the history of Chinese translation of Buddhist sutras from Sanskrit. The first phase translation adopted a ‘word-for-word’ method (zhíyí) which was probably due not only to the lack of bilingual ability among the forum participants, but also to be a belief that the sacred words of the enlightened should not be tempered with. The second phase saw an obvious swing towards ‘free translation’ or yiyi. During the third phase, the approach to translation was to a great extent dominated by Xuan Zang, who had an excellent command of both Sanskrit and Chinese and used transliteration, which was later adopted by many successors. Translation choices were expounded in the prefaces to these texts, perhaps the most influential being by the religious leader Dao’an who directed an extensive translation ‘program’ of Buddhist sutras. He lists five elements called ‘shiben’ (losses) where meaning was subject to change in translation. To summarize, these changes involve: 1. Coping with the flexibility of Sanskrit syntax by reversing to a standard Chinese order; 2. The enhancement of the literariness of the ST to adapt to an elegant Chinese style; 3. The omission of repetitive exclamations; 4. The reduction in the paratextual commentaries that accompany the TTs; 5. The reduction or restructuring to ensure more logical and linear discourse; He also lists three difficulties, or ‘buyi’ that necessitate special care: • The directing of the message to a new audience; • The sanctity of the ST words; • The special status of the STs themselves as the cumulative work of so many followers; These points were to influence the work of the great Kuchan translator and commentator Kumārajīva. The ‘literal’ and ‘free’ poles surface once again in the rich translation tradition of the Arab world, which created the great center of translation in Baghdad. There was intense translation activity in the Abbāsid period (750-1250 AC) which centered on the translation into Arabic of Greek scientific and philosophical material. Baker and Hanna (2009) describe the two translation methods that were adopted during that period. The first method was highly literal and consisted of translating each Greek word with an equivalent Arabic word and often borrowing the Greek word into Arabic. The second method consisted of translating sense-for- sense, which conveyed the meaning of the original without distorting the TL. Arab translators also became very creative in supplying instructive and explanatory commentaries and notes. Before the arrival of the printing press, texts were laboriously copied by hand, which led to numerous errors or variant readings. Latin, controlled by the Church in Rome, had a stranglehold over knowledge and religion until challenged by the European Humanist movement of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The humanists sought liberation from the power of the Church by recovering the refinement of Classical Latin and Greek and their secular writers, free from the changes wrought by the Middle Ages. Then, the Protestant Reformation of northern Europe began to challenge Latin through the translation of the Bible into vernacular languages. The translation of any book which diverged from the Church’s interpretation ran the risk of being deemed heretical and of being censored or banned (i.e Index of the Spanish Inquisition, 1551). The most famous example are the English theologian- translator William Tyndale and the French humanist Étienne Dolet, who were respectively accused and charged with heresy and blasphemy. Therefore, Bible translations dominated book production. Non-literal or non-accepted translation came to be seen and used as a weapon against the Church. The most notable example is Martin Luther’s crucially influential translation into East Central German of the New Testament. Luther played a pivotal role in the Reformation while, linguistically, his use of a regional yet socially broad dialect went a long way to reinforcing that variety of the German language as standard. He believed a ‘word-for-word’ translation would be unable to convey the same meaning as the ST and would sometimes be incomprehensible. FIDELITY, SPIRIT AND TRUTH In her ‘Early Theories of Translation’, Flora Amos sees the history of the theory of translation as ‘by no means a record of easily distinguishable, orderly progression’. To her, early translators often differed considerably in the meaning they gave to terms such as ‘faithfulness’, ‘accuracy’ and even the word ‘translation’ itself. Such concepts are investigated by Louis Kelly in The True Interpreter (1979) starting with the teachings of the Greek and Latin writers of Classical Antiquity and tracing the history of ‘fidelity’, ‘spirit’ and ‘truth’. The concept of fidelity, or faithfulness, was dismissed by Horace (65 – 8 BCE) dismissed it as literal ‘word–for–word’ translation. However, in the 17th century it was identified as faithfulness to the meaning rather than the words. Kelly then describes spirit as similarly having two meanings since the Latin word ‘spiritus’ denotes creative energy or inspiration. Lastly, St. Augustine used the term truth (veritas) in the the sense of ‘content’ of the text. EARLY ATTEMPTS AT SYSTEMATIC TRANSLATION THEORY For Amos, the England of the seventeenth century marked an important step forward in translation theory with ‘deliberate, reasoned statements’. John Dryden, whose brief description of the translation process would have enormous impact on subsequent translation theory and practice. Dryden reduced all translation to three categories: • Metaphrase: ‘word-by-word and line-by-line’; • Paraphrase: ‘translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense’ and this involves changing whole phrases and more or less corresponds to faithful or sense-for-sense translation, which he prefers; • Imitation: ‘forsaking’ for both words and sense and this corresponds to free translation which he rejects, seeing it as the ‘greatest wrong’ to the memory of the translated author; Authors such as Étienne Dolet, whose objective was to disseminate Classical teachings through a Humanist lens and to contribute to the development of the French language as he set out five principles in order to produce a good translation (La manière de bien traduire d’une langue en aultre, 1540): 1. The translator must perfectly understand the ST; 2. The translator should have a perfect knowledge of both SL and TL; 3. The translator should avoid word-forward rendering; 4. The translator should avoid Latinate and unusual forms; 5. The translator should avoid clumsiness; Alexander Tytler (1747-1813) was a Scottish historian and professor. He defines a ‘good translation’ as being oriented towards the target language reader and sets out three general ‘laws’: The major new multi-volume translation of Proust’s novel began to appear in 2002 with Penguin. Christopher Prendergast emphasizes that this is a new translation, benefitting from a corrected source text. He therefore seeks a balance rather than modernizing the old TT. Likewise, Davis insists that her aim was as far as possible to reproduce Proust’s style and to match his style as nearly as he could. DISCUSSION OF CASE STUDIES These two brief case studies indicate that the vocabulary of early translation theory persisted widely to the end of the twentieth century and beyond. The tendency is most of the comments noted above is for a privileging of a ‘natural’ TT. In these cases, one can say that ‘literal’ translation lost out and also that the ‘alienating’ strategy promoted by Schleiermacher has not been followed and what remains is the ‘natural’, almost ‘everyday’ speech style proposed by Luther. Yet the new Penguin Proust translation suggests a possible change of approach in which ‘literal’ indicate the shift in use of this term over the centuries: it now means ‘sticking very closely to the original’. EQUIVALENCE AND EQUIVALENT EFFECT (T.S ‘CHAPTER 3’) Theoreticians in the 1950s and 1960s began to attempt more systematic analyses. The new debate revolved around certain key linguistic issues such as ‘meaning’ and ‘equivalence’ discussed in Roman Jakobson’s 1959 paper. The structuralist Roman Jakobson describes three kinds of translation: intralingual, interlingual and intersemiotic. He follows the theory of language proposed by the famous Swiss Saussure, who distinguished between the linguistic system (langue) and specific individual utterances (parole), which is further differentiated between ‘signifier’ (the spoken and written signal) and the ‘signified’ (the concept) which together creates the linguistic ‘sign’. Jakobson then moves to considers the problem of equivalence in meaning between words in different languages. He states that there is ordinarily no full equivalence between code-units, such as the case of the English ‘cheese’ and Russian ‘syr’. On the one hand, linguistic universalism considers that, although languages may differ in the way they convey meaning and in the surface realizations of that meaning, there is a (more less) shared way of thinking and experiencing the world. On the other hand, linguistic relativity or determinism in its strongest form claims that differences in languages shape different conceptualizations of the world. Briefly speaking, the absence of a word in a language does not mean that a concept cannot be perceived. Full linguistic relativity would mean that translation was impossible, but of course translation does occur in all sorts of different contexts and language pairs. In Jakobson’s description, interlingual translation involves ‘substituting messages in one language not for separate code- units but for entire messages in some other language’. For the message to be ‘equivalent’ in ST and TT, the code-units will necessarily be different since they belong to two different sign systems. The question of translatability then becomes one of degree and adequacy. For Jakobson, cross-linguistic differences, which underlie the concept of ‘equivalence’, center around obligatory grammatical and lexical forms. ‘Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey’ Examples of differences are easy to find as they mainly occur at the level of gender, aspect and semantic fields. Even what for many languages is a basic relational concept such as ‘to be’, ‘être’ and ‘sein’, is broken down in Spanish to ‘ser’ and ‘estar’. As Jakobson puts it ‘all is conveyable in any existing language’. NIDA AND ‘THE SCIENCE OF TRANSLATING’ These concepts were tackled by a new ‘scientific’ approach followed by one of the most important figures in translation studies, the American Eugene Nida. His theory of translation developed from his own practical work from the 1940s onwards when he was translating and organizing the translation of the Bible. Nida attempts to move Bible translation into a more scientific era by incorporating recent work in linguistics. His more systematic approach borrows theoretical concepts and terminology both from semantics and pragmatics and from Noam Chomsky’s work on syntactic structure which formed the theory of a universal generative-transformational grammar. Noam Chomsky’s model analyses sentences into series of related levels governed by rules. The key features of this can be summarized as follows: Phrase-structure rules generate an underlying deep structure which is transformed by transformational rules relating one underlying structure to another (e.g active to passive) to produce a final surface structure, which itself is subject to phonological and morphemic rules. The most basic of such structures are kernel sentences, which are simple, declarative sentences that require the minimum of transformation. For Nida and Tibar, kernels are the basic structural elements out of which a language builds its elaborate surface structures. They are to be obtained from the ST surface structure by a reductive process of back transformation. This entails four types of functional class: events, objects, abstracts (quantities and qualities) and relationals (affixes, prepositions, conjunctions). They claim that all languages have between six and a dozen basic kernel structures. Kernels are the level at which the message is transferred into the receptor language before being transformed into the surface structure in a process of: literal transfer, minimal transfer and literary transfer. Nida incorporates key features of Chomsky’s model into his ‘science of translation’ by providing the translator with a technique for decoding the ST and a procedure for encoding the TT. Thus, the surface structure of the ST is analyzed into the basic elements of the deep structure, which are then transferred in the translation process and then ‘restructured’ semantically and stylistically into the surface structure of the TT. THE NATURE OF MEANING: ADVANCES IN SEMANTICS AND PRAGMATICS Nida describes various ‘scientific approaches to meaning’ related to work that had been carried out by theorists in semantics and pragmatics. Central to his work is the move away from the old idea that a word has a fixed meaning and towards a functional definition of meaning in which a word ‘acquires’ meaning through its context and can produce varying responses according to culture. Therefore, meaning is broken down into the following: • Linguistic meaning: the relationship between different linguistic structures, borrowing elements of Chomsky’s model (ex. ‘his’ may have different meanings); • Referential meaning: the denotative ‘dictionary’ meaning (ie. ‘son’ denotates a ‘male child’); • Emotive or connotative meaning: the associations a word produces (i.e ‘Don’t worry about that, son’); Techniques to determine referential and emotive meaning focus on analyzing the structure of words and differentiating similar words in related lexical fields. These include hierarchical structuring, which differentiates series of words according to their level and techniques of componential analysis. The latter seek to identify and discriminate specific features of a range of related words. Another technique is semantic structure analysis in which Nidia separates out visually the different meanings of spirit according to their characteristics. The central idea is to encourage the translator to realize that the sense of a complex semantic term such as ‘spirit’ varies according to the context because of pragmatics. Above all, Nida stresses the importance of context when dealing with metaphorical meaning and complex cultural idioms in order to clarifying ambiguities. FORMAL- DYNAMIC EQUIVALENCE AND THE PRINCIPLE OF EQUIVALENT EFFECT Nina then talks about ‘two basic orientations’ or ‘types of equivalence’, which are formal equivalence and dynamic equivalence: • Formal equivalence: it focuses attention on the message itself, in both form and content. It is thus keenly oriented towards the ST structure, which exerts strong influence in determining accuracy and correctness. This type of translation will often be used in an academic or legal environment and allows the reader closer access to the language and customs of the source culture; • Dynamic equivalence: dynamic, later ‘functional’, equivalence is based on what Nida calls ‘the principles of equivalent effect’, where the relationship between receptor and message should be substantially the same as that which existed between the original receptors and the message; The message has to be tailored to the receptor’s linguistic needs and cultural expectation and ‘aims at complete naturalness of expression’. The success of the translation thus depends on achieving equivalence effect based on ‘four basic requirements’ which are: making sense, conveying the manner of the original, having a natural form of expression and producing a similar response. The literary system in which translation functions is controlled by two main factors, which can be professionals within the literary system, who partly determine the dominant poetics, and patronage outside the literary system, which partly determines the ideology. As we can see from the image, the professionals within the literary system include critics, reviewers, academics and translators themselves. The outer circle shows the patronage outside the literary system which are ‘the powers that can further or hinder the reading, writing and rewriting of literature’. Patrons may be influential and powerful individuals in a given historical era, groups of people or institutions which regulate the distribution of literature and literary ideas. Lefevere identifies three elements to this patronage: • The ideological component: it constrains the choice of the subject matter and the form of its presentation (form, conventions, beliefs, ideologically focused); • The economic component: payments (royalties, fees); • Status component: the beneficiary of a payment is expected to conform to the patron’s expectations; Patronage is termed undifferentiated if all three components are provided by the same person or group (like in a totalitarian regime) or differentiated when the three components are not dependent on one another. When it comes to the status component, classic statues is enhanced by a book’s inclusion in school or university reading lists and in many other fields. In the final instance and the higher level, the dominant poetics tends to be determined by ideology. The interaction between politics, ideology and translation leads Lefevere to make a key claim according to which, if linguistic and ideological ever enter in conflict, the latter tend to win out. Together, ideology and poetics dictate the translation strategy and the solution to specific problems. TRANSLATION AND GENDER Sherry Simon (1996) criticizes translation studies for often using the term culture as if it referred to an obvious and unproblematic reality. Furthermore, she also sees a language of sexism in translation studies, with its images of dominance, fidelity, faithfulness and betrayal. Feminist theorists also see a parallel between the status of translation, which is often considered to be derivative and inferior to original writing, and that of women, so often repressed in society and literature. This is the core of feminist translation theory, which seeks to ‘identify and critique the tangle of concepts which relegates both women and translation and the bottom of society and literary ladder. Simon gives the example of the ‘committed translation project’, in which feminists translators set out to emphasize their identity and ideological position that was part of the cultural dialogue between Quebec and Anglophone Canada (pag. 205). Simon also quotes Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood whose ‘translation practice is a political activity aimed at making language speak for women and has used every translation strategy to make the feminine visible in language’. Feminist activism and strategies are: • Supplementing, which aims to compensate the loss of some linguistic devices adopted by feminist writers such as Nicole Bossard's wordplay L'Amèr (it contains the terms mère (mother), mer (sea) and amer (bitter), translated by Barbara Godard (1983) as (These Sour Smothers); • Prefacing and footnoting used by feminist translators to make clear their presence in the text and their and the author's commitment to the feminist movement; • Hijacking, which seeks to subvert anti-feminist contents on the original text or tries to display feminist elements which the original does not openly expresses (i.e S. de Lotbinière-Harwood's manipulation of the French text by Lise Gauvin's Lettres d'une autre, `Québecois-e-s' to underline the fact that the speaker is a woman, although the original retained the generic ‘Québecois’; HuMan Rights (to expose implicit sexism); auther (neologism); LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY (AND TRANSLATION ON GAY TEXTS Other research in translation and gender has problematized the issue of language and identity. An example in queer translation is Keith Harvey’s study ‘Translating camp talk’, which involved combining linguistic methods of analysis of literature with a cultural-theory angle, enabling study of the social and ideological environment that conditions the exchange. Contact theory is used by Harvey to examine the way gay men and lesbians work within appropriate prevailing straight (and mostly homophobic) discourses, often appropriating language patterns from a range of communities. Harvey then links the linguistic characteristics of camp to cultural identity via queer theory, which makes the gay community visible and allows it to manifest its identity. In general, markers of gay identity either disappear or are made pejorative in the TT. Examples could be (pag.208): • English terms: pansies (pejorative) and queen (positive) translated in French as tante(s) (aunts); • ‘To be gay’ as en être (to be of it) hiding gay identity; • ‘Perfect weakness’ and ‘screaming pansies’ omitted or rendered in negative terms; Sherry Simon’s focus centres on underlining the importance of the cultural turn in translation. For her, cultural studies brings to translation an understanding of the complexities of gender and culture. It allows us to situate linguistic transfer within the multiple ‘post’ realities of today: poststructuralism, postcolonialism and postmodernism. POSTCOLONIAL TRANSLATION THEORY This area developed from the 1990s as part of the cultural turn in translation studies and as a result of a cross-over from postcolonial studies. Both postcolonial studies and translation studies look at the issues of power relations and control expressed through language and literature in postcolonial societies, where translation as an instrument for colonial domination. Therefore, it has attracted the attention of many translation studies researchers in order to cover studies of the history of the former colonies, studies of powerful European empires and studies the effect of the imbalance of power relations between colonized and colonizer. In particular, Spivak highlights her concern about the ideological consequences of the translation of ‘Third World’ literature into English and the distortion this entails. In her view, such translation is often expressed in ‘translatese’ which eliminates the identity of individuals and cultures that are politically less powerful and leads to a standardization of very different voices. Thus, the ‘politics of translation’ currently gives prominence to English and the other ‘hegemonic’ languages of the ex-colonizers. Her critique of western feminism and publishing is most biting when she states that feminists from the hegemonic countries should show real solidarity with women in postcolonial contexts by learning the language in which those women speak and write. The linking of colonization and translation is accompanied by the argument that translation has played an active role in the colonization process and in disseminating an ideologically motivated image of colonized people and imposing the colonizer’s ideological and cultural value. This has led Bassnett and Trivedi (1999) to refer to the ‘shameful history of translation’. Niranjana’s focus in on the way translation into English has generally been used by the colonial power to construct a rewritten image of the East that has then come to stand for the truth and also considers every group as ‘participating in the enormous project of collection and codification on which colonial power was based. Niranjana’s recommendations for every translator who must call into question every aspect of colonialism and liberal nationalism and ‘dismantle the hegemonic west from within’ through an interventionist approach. Crucial here, are the interrelated concepts of ‘in-betweenness, hybridity, third space’. Translation occurs not only between indigenous and colonial languages but also between colonial languages themselves (in Africa, English and French). Sathya Rao (2006) proposes the term ‘non-colonial translation theory’, which considers the original as a radical immanence indifferent to the ‘colonial’ world and therefore untranslatable into it’. This calls for a ‘radical foreign performance’ or non-translation. It is important to remember that theorists themselves have their own ideologies and political agendas that drive their own criticisms and these are what Brownlie calls ‘committed approaches’ to translation studies, which have widened the horizons of translations studies. An example could be Lorca’s cryptic language in ‘Ode At Walt Whitman’ that was re-elaborated by Spicer in order to serve his agenda: a direct denunciation of the oppressed situation of the gay community. THE POSITIONS AND POSITIONALITY OF THE TRANSLATOR Toury (2012) warns that explicit comments from participants in the translation process need to be treated with circumspection since they may be biased. Venuti’s ‘call to action’ for translators to adopt visible and foreignizing practices. Translators also often consider that their work is intuitive, that they must be led by language and listen to their ‘ear’. In similar vein, Margaret Sayers Peden listens to the ‘voice’ of the ST since she defines it ‘as the way something is communicated’. Furthermore, translators should generally rely on their creativity in order to operate. Felstiner makes the important point that much of the work that goes into producing a translation ‘becomes invisible’ once the new poem stands intact’. Another factor that is often taking into consideration is positionality, which is the critical attitude leading the ‘reader to think’ and that has become much more central in translation studies. The ideology of a translation resides not simply in the text translated, but in voicing and stance of the translator, and in the relevance to the receiving audience. These latter features are affected by the place of enunciation, which is an ideological positioning as well as a geographical or temporal one. The translator is then seen as ‘an intervenient being’ (Carol Maier). THE SOCIOLOGY AND HISTORIOGRAPHY OF TRANSLATION The study of translators and the social nature of translation have become center stage in translation studies research. Many studies have drawn on the work of ethnographer and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1977): • Field (of social activity; translator, commissioner, author, etc.); • Habitus or disposition (the translator’s ‘mindset’ or ‘cultural mind’ which is heavily influenced by family and education. It is therefore the product of an individual history); • Capital (economic, social, cultural, symbolic); • Illusio (cultural limits of awareness); Daniel Simeoni (1948) stresses that the study of the ‘translatorial habitus’ complements and improves on Toury’s norm-based descriptive translation studies by focusing on how the translator’s own behaviour and agency contribute to the establishment of norms. He concludes that translation is a poorly structured activity where ‘most translating agents exert their activity in fields where their degree of control is negligible’ and their habitus is generally one of ‘voluntary servitude’. Sociology was the main ‘new perspective’ in translation studies and Andrew Chesterman stresses that the importance of this approach lies in emphasizing translation practice and how other agents act. Other scholars such as Niklas Luhmann views society as a complex of closed functional systems that operate beyond the immediate influence of humans. THE POWER NETWORK OF THE TRANSLATION THEORY Venuti has already described and lamented how the literary translator works from contract to contract often for a usually modest fat flee, with the publishers initiating most translations and generally seeking to minimize the translation cost. Venuti deplores this as another form of repression exercised by the publishing industry. Fawcett (1995) describes this complex network as amounting to a ‘power play’ with the final product considerably shaped by editors and copy-editors. In some cases, the power play may result in the ST author’s omission from the translation process altogether. There is a range of other agents playing key roles in the preparation, dissemination and fashioning of translations. The volume edited by Milton and Bandia (2009) provides detailed examples of such cultural ‘gate-keepers’ to use Bourdieu’s term, whose work has been innovative either stylistically or politically. For many authors writing in other languages, the benchmark of success is to be translated into English. In fact, the decision whether or not to translate a work is the greatest power wielded by the editor and publisher. According to Vernuti, publishers in the UK and USA tend to choose works that are easily assimilated into the target culture. The percentage of books translated in both countries is extremely low and this imbalance as seen as yet another example of the cultural hegemony of the British and American publishing and culture. THE RECEPTION AND REVIWING OF TRANSLATIONS Meg Brown stresses the role of viewers in informing the public about recently published books and in preparing the readership for the work. Brown adopts ideas from ‘reception theory’, including examining the way a work conforms to, challenges or disappoints the readers’ aesthetic ‘horizon of expectations’ and it refers to their general expectations of the genre or series to which the new work belongs. Therefore, reviews are also a useful source of information concerning that culture’s view of translation itself and they’re considered to be ‘the body of reactions’. Many studies show that reviews prefer ‘fluent’ translations written in modern, general, standard English that is ‘natural and idiomatic’. There is not set model for the analysis of reviews in translation, although the whole gamut of para-texts is the subject of the cultural theorist Genette (1997) and he considers two kinds of paratextual elements: • Peritexts: they appear in the same location as the text and are provided by the author pr publisher. They are subordinated to the text but is crucial in guiding the reading process; • Epitexts: they are any paratextual elements not materially appended to the text within the same volume but circulating in a virtually limitless physical and social space; If we additionally adopt the analytical approach of reception theory (Jauss, 1982), we can analyse reviews synchronically (examination of a range of reviews of a single work) or diachronically (examination of reviews of books of an author or newspaper over a longer time period. AUDIOVISUAL TRANSLATION AND HUMOUR In 1989, Delabastita described AVT as a “virgin area of research” which has quickly developed. By doing so AVT has developed “its very own theoretical and methodological approaches, allowing it to claim the status of a scholarly area of research in its own right. Although it’s a worldwide adopted phenomenon, there have been some terminological differences when it comes to its definition. After an extensive discussion of the state of the art, Gambier (2003) offered the terms “screen trans-adaption” as opposed to “language transfer” since the former takes into account the extra-linguistic elements such as pictures and sounds. According to Chaume, messages in audiovisual texts are conveyed either through the acoustic or visual channel. The first ones include the transmission of words, paralinguistic information, soundtrack, special effects whereas images, colors, movements and facial expressions are conveyed thanks to the second channel. HISTORICAL OVERVIEW: FROM LUMIERE TO NETFLIX Since 1895, Louis Lumiere’s invention of the silent movies has never ceased to evolve, from silent to talking movies in the twentieth century, to hyper-technological productions in the new millennium. Moreover, the turn of the century coincided with the first attempt to introduce the acoustic elements into cinema production which eventually led to the creation of talking movies, also known as talkies. However, Hollywood film studios started to face the problem of translating their movies in non-English speaking countries: with subtitling being too elusive due to the high level of illiteracy (1920-30’), they originally adopted the idea of producing local versions of the movies in the targeted countries but ultimately ended up promoting the use of ‘doubling’, known as dubbing. Nevertheless, other countries adopted subtitling while others voice-over (a translated audio is displayed over the original one). Moreover, historical and political reasons played an important role in the choice of dubbing as the preferred mode of AVT in countries such as Italy, Germany and Spain: • The Fascist Regime was concerned with building a strong nationalistic spirit by means of propaganda and this covered every means of media production, including cinema by supporting the ‘Centro sperimentale di Cinecittà’ in order to control material through dubbing; • By the same token, the Spanish ‘Junta Superior de Censura Cinematografica’ issued a decree to stop any film to be screened in any language other than Spanish; Another significant trend that need to be borne in mind is that there is a constant increase in the number of subscribers to pay-TV and on-demand services (Netflix, Hulu ecc…) with such a variety of offerings that has certainly been made possible by the rapid advances in Information Technology and that allows the audience to watch products in their original language, subtitled, dubbed and so forth because they’re given a choice and are now become active participants in the shaping and transferring of audiovisual content. Once the translators delivers their ‘raw’ translation, the dialogue writer or adaptor adapts it to match the lip movements (lip-sync) of the actors on the screen. The dialogue writer also strives to make the TT sound more natural and ensure its maximum ‘speakability’ and ‘performability’. Then the dubbing director advises the actors- or dubbers- during their performance: they’re normally chosen in relation to the character they have to dub to make sure they match as much as possible, which is a process known as character synchrony. Dubbing is a process that involves the complete deletion of the original source text, which is replaced by TT, while the visual and verbal text remains unaltered. It can be interlingual (between two languages) or intralingual, when the original dialogue track is re-voiced in order to correct or overcome technical issues compromised by external factors. Dubbing is the place for manipulation but also creativity, especially when humour is at stake. Nevertheless, dubbing must ensure coherence between images and words. Post- synchronisation involves isochrony, which requires matching the length of the translated text with the actor’s or actress’s utterance and therefore depends on the nature of the camera angle and shot involved. Furthermore, the coherent combination of the text with paratextual elements (or nucleus sync) are extremely important to ‘the quality of the final product’. Audiovisual texts are based on ‘prefabricated orality’ which means that they’re ‘written texts to be spoken as if they were not written’. Clearly, the final dialogues are shown to sound unnatural and extremely artificial and these features are present in the dubbing field too, generally known as ‘dubbese’ (‘doppiagese’ in Italian) which dialogue writers tried to avoid by making use of linguistic devices that can recreate the illusion of the ST’s linguistic features. Dubbing clearly suffers from a more marked feeling of non-spontaneous orality. This is often due to time pressure inside and outside the dubbing booth but also to linguistic factors (ex. neutral Spanish that would combine features of major Spanish dialects and Latin American localism to cater to all Spanish audiences). CAPTIONING Captioning is an umbrella term used to define all those AVT modes that involve a written translation of a text, which is inserted on or next to the screen where the original is shown. Like dubbing, subtitling is growing in traditionally dubbing countries. In general, all captioning modes are constrained in terms of time and space but they do not require lip-synchronization. However, temporal synchronization- also known as timing, cueing, the spotting dialogue or generally isochrony- is needed to ensure that the written text and the soundtrack match. Then the subtitlers work to provide a condensed version of the ST because subtitles can normally extend over 35-40 characters. Surtitles can be both interlingual and intralingual and they’re usually employed in opera and theatre by appearing above the stage but can also be found projected on small screens on the back of the seats. Good timing is essential too. Subtitling (or surtitling) for deaf and hard of hearing usually implies an intralingual transfer such as the different recoloring patterns that match the speaker. Alternatively, the name of the speaker is provided in the subtitle. Also, this type of subtitling must include symbols or onomatopoeic references to the sounds effects in the original text or closed captioning with important elements of spoken language (e.g discourse markers, hesitations, false starts or repetitions). SUBTITLING AND FANSUBBING Subtitling is defined by Gambier as ‘moving from the oral dialogue to one/two written lines and from one language to another, sometimes to two languages’. Some target cultures that have a positive attitude towards foreign cultures tend to welcome subtitling more than others. For many intellectuals, subtitling might have a ‘defamiliarising’ effect since subtitles are perceived as a ‘supplement of a film’ and within which contemporary perceptions of nativeness and foreignness are thematized and problematized without being rectified. According to Marleau, subtitling is a ‘necessary evil’ which includes the following disadvantages: 1. Subtitles cover part of the visual image thus depriving that target audience of part of it; 2. Receivers have to divide their attention between the visual and the written text, involving a partial loss of both; 3. Subtitles are hardly legible when they are presented against a bright background; 4. While reading the subtitles viewers are likely to experience a ‘visual shock’ which is caused when subtitles appear and disappear from the screen; Like any form of translation, condensation in subtitling causes some losses such as aesthetic losses or of the ‘interpersonal element’. Other losses can relate to the specific use of language (ex. ‘good morning’>’hi/hello’ means a change not only in style but also in terms of time reference). Deciding how much has to be retained or deleted is an inescapable dilemma when it comes to subbing because of the ‘mini-max effect’. Many conclude that ‘it is the balance between the effort required by the viewer to process an item and its relevance for the understanding of the film narrative that determines whether or not it is to be included in the translation’. A specific kind of subtitling is fan-subbing which started during the 80’s in order to translate Japanese anime and manga thanks to the effort on amateurs translators. Nowadays it refers to ‘designate forms of collaborative audiovisual translation undertaken by ordinary people to benefit members of a transnational community’. Fan-subbing expanded to other languages and genres. However, fan-subbing has been a sort of ‘market disobedience’ because it is at the margins of legality, verging on media piracy. Moreover, they can be divided into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ subs: the former are merged on the video, which is copy-righted. Conversely, soft subs are distributed as separated files that are not liable for copyright infringement. Indeed, fan-subbing becomes empowering for fans who develop their own standards, which overlook those normally used in industrial subtitling. Subbers have a say not only in the way verbal text is translated but also in how it appears on the screen. Fan-subbing tends to be closer to the original text. Nevertheless, Dwyer has suggested that this unwillingness to abide by institutionalized regulatory norms may be partly the result of subbers’ lack of formal training in AVT since it’s generally non-profit. Quality in fan-subbing has also been deemed poor due to the fact that subs are often married by typos and interpretation problems which make receivers perceive them as a second-rate product. Recently, AVT scholars have concentrated on how fan-subbing’s subversive approach has influenced professional practice. Pérez-Gonzalez uses the term cross-fertilization to describe how specific features of transformative subtitling have entered mainstream inter- and intralingual subtitling. In a similar way, Chaume explores this phenomenon and calls it creative subtitling by showing how captions of different fonts and colors have been implemented in mainstream productions such as the series ‘Good Behaviour’ to convey extra- linguistic meaning. AVT IN ITALY In Italy, AVT is the result of the nationalistic regime that ruled the country during the early decades of the twentieth century. However, before the Fascist regime came to power, US/Hollywood corporate businesses such as FOX and MGM had found a flourishing market in Italy due to the fact, after World War I, the Italian film industry had lost much of its market. American distributors opened their offices in Italy and managed to attract investment from American banks that supported the penetration of the Italian market by US films. By contrast, Mussolini always understood the importance of building a strong nationalistic spirit through propaganda and media productions, including cinema. Mussolini’s 1930 decree ruled that dubbing was to become the translation mode for all imported productions in Italy. This makes, up till this day, Italy one of the key markets for the film industry in Europe. Dubbing is virtually the only situation used in mainstream Italian TV, as confirmed by Antonini’s (although subtitling is very influential too). Paolinelli’s work is a detailed account of the state of the Italian dubbing industry. He laments the tendency to consider films according to their marketing potential rather than as works of art, which has been affecting the quality of dubbing and of services and products. The AIDAC (Associazione Italiana Doppiatori e Adattori Cinetelevisivi) has been working hard to make sure the quality of dubbing is kept to high standards. It has ensured that the adaptors’ rights are protected by law, which considers them authors as much as the writers of the original screenplay. Adaptors can claim 50% of the cost of the dubbed version if asked to create subtitles based on their dubbed version. AIDAC sometimes overlooks the role of translators, who seem to exist only as making a marginal contribution to the whole dubbing process. Galassi (1994) informs us that an adaptor may not know or have a limited knowledge of the SL of the material they’re working on. In Italian AVT, what really counts is one adaptor’s ability to adequately adapt the TT to the visual elements on the screen. Punning has received a large amount of interest especially from Linguistics and Psycholinguistics, which developed two different level of analysis. Linguists concentrate on the elements that allow the two opposing meanings to be brought together. These elements are known as ‘connectors’ and ‘disjunctor’, while Raskin names them ‘script-switch trigger’ in which the Logical Mechanism that resolute the incongruity is referred to as ‘Cratylism’. On the other hand, the latter considers the cognitive process at work in the perception of the potential humour of the pun, also known as ‘frame-shifting’. Delabastita (1996) has called ‘double reading’ the ability that punning has to evoke simultaneously two or more contrasting meanings that one or more words may have. According to him, there are four different types of puns based on their characteristics: 1. Homonymy, when words have ‘identical sounds and spelling’; 2. Homophony, when words have ‘identical sounds but different spellings’; 3. Homography, when words have ‘identical spelling but different sounds’; 4. Paronymy, when there are slight differences in both cases; Later on, they’ve been redefined the main typologies of puns and subsumed them into two macro categories: homonymy and heteronymy. The former includes those instances of punning based on homophony and homography, whereas punning based on words that are homographic but not homophonic are called ‘eye puns’. Conversely, puns based on paronymy are subsumed under the heteronymy category. Moreover, Delabastita has pointed out that this contrast cam be produced in two ways: • Vertical (or paradigmatic) presentation, when one of the linguistic structures is not present in the text and has to be triggered by the receiver through their knowledge (ex. X: Do you believe in clubs for young people? Y: Only when kindness fails); • Horizontal (or syntagmatic) presentation, when two or more similar linguistic structures are present in the text; However, Delabastita typologies fail to include instances of puns based on synonymous words. As said before, humour and wordplay can be based on purely verbal text (verbal) and hinges upon a linguistic and grammatical ambiguity but they can also combine with verbal and visual elements (situational). Most cases seem to involve puns that are language-intrinsic and static but there may be instances of interactional and dynamic puns as they’re based on the conversational structure of the text (‘pun’ or ‘repartee’). Delabastita has claimed that puns are not self-standing elements in the text but they function in it for specific purposes such as challenging our stereotyped ideas on culture or taboo topics. PUNS BASED ON FIXED EXPRESSIONS AND IDIOMS (FEI) Puns based on longer textual units rather than on one or two words (Attardo 1994: 132) are known as FEI (fixed expressions and idioms). They’re different from culture-specific references (CSRs) because they’re extra-linguistic since they’re not part of the language system. Moon (1998) questions three general assumptions about FE and I: 1. their institutionalisation (i.e. they are well-established linguistic units that are universally used by speakers of a language); 2. their canonical form (i.e. fixed lexicogrammatical form); 3. they are non-compositional (i.e. (i.e. their meaning does not depend on the meaning of the single words composing it but on the unit as a whole); Moon has divided three categories of FE and I and they are: 1. anomalous collocations (e.g. “by and large”); 2. formulae (including sayings, proverbs and similes such as “like a lamb to the slaughter”); 3. more or less transparent metaphors (e.g. “behind someone’s back”) 4. Due to overlapping, a fourth group has been named dual classifications, including peculiar types of ill-formed proverbs or metaphors (e.g. “have your cake and eat it); Variation is a significant feature of all three types of fixed expressions and idioms (anomalous collocations, formulae and metaphors). Variation may occur: • at the lexical level (e.g. verb variation (“set/start the ball rolling”), noun level (“a piece/slice of the action”); • and at the systemic level, which involves both syntax and lexis (e.g. “get the cold shoulder/give someone the cold shoulder”). Rather than a ”canonical form” of a Fe or I, we can have clusters of fixed expressions and idioms which share common lexis. Clusters may have common lexicogrammatical “frame” where the lexis changes while the underlying grammatical frame remains. More precisely these clusters should be seen as sharing a common conceptual core called idiom schema. Idiom schemas can be used to explain variability. Moon then concludes that the interpretation of novel fixed expressions and idioms depends on two main factors. On the one hand, the receiver has to be able to link the variation of fixed expressions and idioms to the schema underlying the cluster of canonical forms. On the other hand, the manipulated fixed expression or idiom has to make itself recognisable as belonging to a given set. Veisbergs (1997) has contributed to the understanding of how the variation (or transformation) of idioms works by distinguishing between variation in terms of ‘structural’ changes that affect both the structure and the meaning of the idiom and ‘semantic’ changes that do not affect the idiom’s structure but only its meaning. Most importantly, he investigates it via addition, insertion, ellipsis and substitution that contains an obvious element of wordplay, which occurs because a double reading of the idiom is triggered. He calls this phenomenon ‘dual actualization’ creates a dichotomy between the idiomatic and literal (compositional) meaning of the idiom. Moon has used the term ‘exploitation’ for the stylistic variation of fixed expressions and idioms for humorous purposes and she has pointed out that the exploitation occurs mainly with metaphorical fixed expressions and idioms because their images can be easily transformed. Like punning, the exploitation of a FEI can be said to carry potential humour when they involve overlapping and opposition of meanings and or/scripts. The creative exploitation of fixed expressions and idioms can easily result in puns that are based on an Incongruity-Resolution inferencing process. PUNS BASED ON VERBAL AND NON-VERBAL TEXT In discussing the translation of the visual jokes, many scholars have discussed the idea of ‘compensation’ when it comes to translating visual and non-verbal text. Balirano and Corduas (2008) and Balirano (2015) call it ‘semiotically expressed humour’ because based on ‘both linguistic and semiotic elements relevant for the construction of humorous effect’. This kind of humour implies a visual script, which is ‘a piece of semiotic information surrounding an image, a word or a sound inferred by them, separately or simultaneously’. Zabalbeascoa has generally suggested textual manipulation to compensate for this type of puns. PUNNING AND TRANSLATION Delabastita has helpfully put forward a typology of eight translation strategies that are at the translators’ disposal to help them deal with wordplay. These particular strategies may be applied if, for example, the source and target languages are historically related, such as Spanish and Italian. Clearly, the last technique cannot be applied to audiovisual text, since endnotes or footnotes cannot be used in spoken texts. Other scholars such as Chiaro have proposed strategies when it comes to wordplay strategies: 1. leaving the verbal humour unchanged; 2. replacing the original source of verbal humour with a different instance in the TT; 3. replacing the original source of verbal humour with an idiomatic expression in the TT; 4. ignoring the instance of verbal humour altogether; Yet, FEI-based puns are likely to be important elements of the ST and failing to transfer them may entail the loss of its stylistic (and humorous) effect and its perlocution. • FEI-Based Puns in Dubbing. Transfer and equivalence have again been used in a significant number of cases. However, neutralization has also been used quite often. Interestingly, I have detected one instance of omission, which is intended here as a change in the meaning of the passage that cancels its humorous potential (see examples pages 144-151); • FEI-Based Puns in Captioning. As mentioned before, this kind of wordplay is not extremely frequent in the first two seasons. Both the official subtitler and subbers have opted for source-oriented strategies. Interestingly, while the subtitler has preferred equivalence to render most ST’s FEI-based puns in Italian, the subbers have used direct transfer (see examples on pages. 152-157); Puns based on Verbal and Non- Verbal (Visual) Puns In some cases, the non-verbal part of the pun is sometimes conveyed via subtitling while in other cases it is spelled out by one of the characters verbally or with gestures. The verbal text in this type of wordplay may rely on different linguistic devices: idioms, metaphors and similes. However, they can all be considered as successful instances of humour only because they are linked to the visuals. The interesting result is that in the subtitled version a much higher of verbal and non-verbal puns has been transferred than in the fan-subbed version. However, the latter displays a higher number of items that have been manipulated via equivalence and substitution (see pag. 157-164). FINDING AND CONCLUSIONS The peculiar exploitations of language-specific elements are often difficult to translate, especially when languages belong to different families. In all three translated datasets preference was given to retaining the original mechanism (Cratylism) via transfer or equivalence. The dubbed version features more variety in terms of adopted strategies than the two captioning datasets. This is probably due to the technical advantages that dubbing offers. The strategies used are: • Equivalence: it aims to retain the perlocution of the text and the language-based device even if it means manipulating the text during the translation process to make it more accessible to the TT receivers (functional manipulation); • Substitution: it entails an even greater degree of manipulation to make sure the perlocution is equally conveyed thanks to a creative exploitation of language; • Neutralization: it is probably more target-oriented in this sense, because it preserves the general meaning of the passage and part of its humour, even if punning has to be sacrificed; • Omission: it is the least desirable option because it cancels the wordplay, along with any trace of humour in the text; HUMOROUS CULTURE-SPECIFIC REFERENCES Culture-specific references (CSRs) can be used to convey specific characterising features regarding those who utter them and offer new perspectives since Modern Family seeks to portray a modern American society in which families are likely to differ from the way they were traditionally conceived. They also appear to be a recurrent mechanism of humour creation. However, they pose major problems when it comes to translation. DEFINING CSRS Ranzato (2016) has offered an exhaustive overview of the way this phenomenon has been treated in the literature. Drawing on Leppihalme’s seminal study and his definition of an ‘allusion’ as an umbrella term that includes ‘a variety of uses of preformed linguistic material in either its original or modified form, and of proper names, to convey often implicit meaning’, Dore (2008) uses the term ‘culture-specific allusions’ to explore how such items were used in their original or modified form for humorous purposes and the challenges arising when dubbing them. To return to the definition of CSRs, Ranzato states: Words or composed locutions typical of a geographical environment of a culture, of the material life or of historical-social peculiarities of a nation, country, tribe and which carry a national or historical meaning and do not have a precise correlation in other languages. It is worth noting that CSRs may not always have a precise equivalent in another language because different culture may look at the same thing from a different perspective and the interpretation may also depend on subjective factors, including the socio-cultural background of the reader or receiver of the text. Culture specificity entails an array of problems that need proper understanding in order to be tackled. Equally important is the type of text the CSRs are embedded. Chiaro (2009) has brought the importance of the verbal and visual text to the fore by claiming that ‘CSRs are entities that are typical of one particular culture, and that culture alone, and they can be either exclusively or predominantly visual, exclusively verbal or else both visual and verbal’. TYPES AND SOURCES OF CSRS CRSs are difficult to frame within a given set of categories. Scholars such as Leppihalme distinguishes between: • Expressions that contain a ‘Proper-Name’ and mostly consist of names of people who exist or else existed in the past, fictional characters, places, biblical names and figures of myth. Nevertheless, Leppihalme seems to neglect other types of CSRs like those derived from the so-called ‘material culture’ (e.g. proper names of things or brand names used metonymically to refer to food, drinks, toys); • Expressions that hat do not and therefore were grouped into the ‘Key-Phrase’ category; • Stereotyped allusions that have lost freshness and whose source can hardly be evoked such as clichés and proverbs. They seem to be mainly drawn from biblical texts such as the New and the Old Testament, along with Shakespeare’s works, twentieth-century literature and some popular or patriotic songs; • Semi-allusive comparisons (or superficial comparisons); • Eponymous adjectives are described as derived from proper names and not forming ‘fixed collocations with their current headwords’; Dore (2008) drew on Davies-Gonzalez and Scott-Tennent and decided to divide the ‘social’ category into: high-culture institutional references (literature, institutions, politics, art) and popular culture (nursery rhymes, TV, cinema, sport). Other considerations relate to Pedersen’s studies. Some CSRs can be considered as trans- cultural meaning that they are no longer limited to their original culture but are easily recognisable by most people because they can be retrieved from common encyclopaedic knowledge and can further distinguished from monocultural CSRs since they’re ‘less identifiable by the majority of people of the TT audience’. Finally, CSRs can be classified as micro-cultural because they can be correctly processed only by a limited number of people in the source culture. Another important parameter has set is that CSRs can be text eternal (they exist outside the fictional world within which they’re found) or text internal because they exist only within the text. Ranzato then draws on Pedersen and Diaz-Cintas and Remael to devise her own taxonomy: • Real-word references. They include source culture references (people, palace, history, politics> high culture references), intercultural references, third culture references and target culture reference; • Intertextual references. They include overt intertextual allusions (references to works of art and literature as well as popular culture), covert intertextual allusions (indirect references or allusions to other texts), intertextual micro-allusions (entire programs that refer to another text); As long as the second strategy is concerned, Pedersen sees the replacement of an official equivalent in subtitling as a type of retention. Conversely, Ranzato considers it a sort of substitution in dubbing. Other scholars see it as addition, so a form or explicitation in subtitling which is likely to be used despite space constraints. Ranzato instead uses the term ‘creative addition’ to talk about often arbitrary authorial interventions by the adapter that occur in Italian dubbing to enhance the humorous effect of the TT. This strategy can be clustered under the more general Compensation category. However, Gottlieb (2009) has rightly observed that: Categories are established to accommodate all findings, different categories reflect significant differences in one’s findings and the number of categories reflect the number of findings. DATA ANALYSIS As with punning, they’re studied in a ‘given scene’ (such as ‘bonus scenes’ or ‘credit cookies’). Since Modern Family is a TV comedy series whose target audience is generally made up of young people and adults with an average education. Hence, the CSRs are mostly derived from ‘Popular Culture’ and ‘High culture/institution’ category. As for the characters: • Cameron makes use of a substantial number of ‘High Culture/Institutions’ references that often derive from literature, theatre and so on. However, he also scores very high in his references to pop music and gay icons such as The Supremes, Donna Summer, Olivia Newton John and so forth. Mitchell often claims he defies gay stereotypes and sometimes he avoids showing affection in public although he loves Lady Gaga; • Jay uses a good deal of CSRs of the ‘Popular culture’ type but they usually refer to singers, comedians and films of the past and their characters. Gloria rarely uses references to North American culture and that’s consistent with her character since she’s a foreigner; • Phil uses many references that are part of the ‘Popular culture’ category and often creates puns with them. Claire and her children also make us of CSRs which become humorous within their conversations. Unsurprisingly, Manny and Alex quote Hemingway and Albert Einstein because they’re the smart kids of the family while Haley, whenever she mentions CSRs, does it incorrectly because she’s superficial. MULTILINGUAL HUMOUR IN AVT Multilingualism is a worldwide phenomenon and the members of many multi-ethnic communities often possess a bilingual background and use code-switching and code-mixing to express and assert their identity. It is therefore not surprising that this factor has been captured in fictional representations. Delabastita and Grutman have considered that ‘it matters relatively little whether it is a national, artificial or dialectal language because what matters is the inter-play it activates’. The inter-play can be used to convey conflicts, characters configuration, mimesis and suspense management. Most importantly, interlingual misunderstandings and mistranslations can be exploited for comic effect by introducing an incongruity or conflict between characters. The development of a heightened sensitivity raises a series of questions regarding how multilingual humour is dealt within Audiovisual Translation (AVT). De Bonis (2015) defines multilingual movies as those films that feature ‘an intercultural encounter, in which at least two different languages are spoken’ thus playing a relevant role in the story (i.e meta-genre). Multilingualism explained that it can take place by means of ‘homogenisation’ or ‘vehicular matching’. The former involves representing heterolingual speech by the use of no more than a foreign sounding accent. In contrast, the latter entails a much greater degree of linguistic variation. Corrius and Zabalbeascoa (2011), Zabalbeascoa (2012) and Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014) have attempted a systematic conceptualization of this phenomenon according to the following considerations: 1. A language L (be it L1, L2, L3) “might be a standard language, or a dialect or some other form of language variation”; 2. An audiovisual source text can have one or more main languages (L1(s) if their presence is quantitatively equal, as in the case of bilingual productions; 3. Audiovisual texts are usually translated into an L2; 4. A translated text may make use of two or more languages or language variations, which are labelled respectively as L2a, L2b and so on, whether their presence is quantitatively equal within the text (e.g. standard Italian pronunciation and a regional variant); 5. Multilingual productions, by contrast, include a third language, which is part of its communication acts. L3 is used to describe instances of language variation that differ from the film’s L1. In this sense, L3 is not an actual language but a notion related to language variation, textual multilingualism and intra-textual translation; Zabalbeascoa and Voellmer (2014) provide a list of possible solutions to allow for the transfer of the L3st into the target language. The solutions under the A scenario, which postulates a greater or lesser degree of neutralization, have been extensively used in Italian dubbing. However, the loss of language varieties in dubbing has been compensated by a larger use of expletives or slang. Recent dubbed movies have proven to be geared towards a more faithful rendering of multilingualism. Ramos Pinto (2016) empirical study on the perception of multilingualism in subtitling Portoguese has attempted to verify this. Her starting assumption was that using a standardization strategy might not result in a loss of meaning because the viewers are able to extract those meanings from other elements, which are conveyed by the simultaneous presence and understanding of the ST and TT. Ramos Pinto (2016) has sought to understand whether a good level of competence in the source language can alter the perception of multilingualism in subtitling. Counter to expectations, she has proven that language competence does not make multilingualism easier to detect by L2 learners. Most importantly, she has demonstrated that signalling linguistic variety in subtitling is a useful tool that helps TT viewers to arrive at a more accurate interpretation. However, it may cause a striking mismatch so it could thus be concluded that it can be allowed but should not be abused. TRANSLATING MULTILINGUAL HUMOUR Multilingual humour poses a challenge in translation. The suspension of disbelief usually applies to any cinematic experience, regardless of its genre. Those characters that code-switch and/or code-mix often, but not always, come from less affluent immigrant backgrounds. As Heiss (2014) explains that ‘in many comedies that depict a multi-ethnic society, the humor is expected to function as a binding element between the ‘foreign’ immigrant and the host culture of the immigration country’. In Italian dubbing, it has been found that multilingual humour is flattened out or compensated for via non-native use of the main language of communication (De Bonis 2014). As for comedy, Italian dubbing has also resorted to domesticating strategies, that is using regional varieties of Italian to compensate for the loss of the L3 and its humorous function (e.g. “creative dubbing”). Heiss justifies this approach by stating that comedy is a genre that is usually perceived as “being detached from reality” and can therefore allow “for ‘unorthodox’ solutions in film translation”. That said, a certain degree of functional manipulation of the text can be employed in order to salvage the STl3 and its perlocutionary effect. Like other AVT modes, AD is subject to constraints, which mostly relate to the issue of time since it must not interfere with other parts of the text is far from easy. It is also a challenging task, especially because accessibility is not neutral and each describer is likely to provide a different version of the non-verbal text. Yet, describers are trained to ‘suggest rather than explain’ (López-Vera 2006) so describing what is happening without giving their own interpretation. When it comes to professionalism, Audio Describers can be extremely creative when attempting to define forms, colors and materials but adjectives expressing judgement or attitude, behaviour and state of mind tend to be avoided. Another important aspect to bear in mind is that the needs of the potential pool of receivers may differ widely. Therefore, people who are born blind, who may be temporally visually impaired or whose sight may be in decline due to age may have different expectations so that it is impossible to cater to all of them. For instance, Frenso (2016) experiment on the reception of AD by the blind and visually impaired audience has confirmed that rather than imposed upon them. In other words, descriptions feed information into schemata that already exist in the audience’s mind and this helps them to process the audiovisual product. The increase in demand for AD content has motivated research on the use and reception of human versus text-to-speech AD. Fernandez-Torne (2016) survey has found that blind and visually impaired people generally prefer human-voiced AD to synthetic-voiced AD. Another merit of Fernandez-Torne (2016) is her focus on the application of machine-translation technologies to the creation of AD scripts to find whether machine-translation could be used in AD. For his part, Lopez-Vera has found that it is less expensive to create new AD content than translate it. If no AD is provided, blind people are typically denied access to the visual- and occasionally, the acoustic- features that a joke may contain. However, that does not mean that the humorous reward will be zero, since other elements may still achieve at least part of the humorous intent. But obviously, providing AD enhances the possibilities of success of total humorous enjoyment. HUMOUR IN AUDIO DESCRIPTION Drawing on Martinez-Sierra examination of the mockumentary ‘Borat!’, we see that the ‘relevance theory’ postulates that an input is relevant to an individual if it results in a significant change in their mental representation of the world, i.e contextual or cognitive effects. The latter can be divided into three initial categories: • contextual implication, meaning a new assumption added to our inventory of existing ones and created from the combination of one or various existing assumptions; • strengthening, that is when new information reinforces an existing assumption; • contradiction, which is found when new information weakens or contradicts an existing assumption, even leading to its abandonment; Martínez-Sierra (2009, 2010, 2020) has shown the challenges that the AD of humour poses, which he claims are often due to time and space constraints. Losses in humour may be compensated by the verbal text of the film (characters’ utterances and other sounds). Comparing AD scripts produced in different languages may help to understand what the AD of humour entails and requires, and how it is handled interculturally and inter-linguistically (Sanz-Moreno’s (2018) contrastive analysis of taboo topics in English and Spanish ADs). However, since the main pose of a comedy film is to produce laughter, detaching an essential part (the AD of the images) from the audiovisual text and treating it as an independent message does not seem a viable solution. As Martinez-Sierra himself acknowledges, during such a process language- and culture- related differences are likely to crop up. Translating AD is currently fought against by some Italian describers who do not take the American Ads into account. For instance, an experienced describer such as Laura Giordani has claimed that most Italian Ads follow the suggestions and guidelines that non-profit organizations working to improve the life of blind and visually impaired audience people give them. Consequently, she considers Italian ADs much different from the American one because the latter ‘are very good scripts’ while we (Italians) are ‘authors’. Examining AD scripts in different languages help us to understand what the AD of humour entails and requires. Sanz-Moreno (2018) contrastive investigation of English and Spanish Ads has been conceived to determine how taboo topics such as nudity, sexuality and so on are handled in different languages and cultures. Her study appears to suggest that different cultures do have different attitudes to taboo topics such as sex and their treatment in translation (ex. ‘The Hangover I’, pag. 267) and she rightly remarks that the aim of AD is to reproduce the same or similar effects to those produced for a normal viewers audience. As suggested above, humor in audiovisual texts is many-sided. According to many scholars, there can be eight different potentially humorous elements that can be found in those audiovisual texts intending to provoke humor. • Referential elements: they refer to cultural or intertextual features, which are specifically rooted in and tied to a specific culture and unknown to others; • Preferential elements: they refer to features whose topics appear to be more popular in certain cultures than in others, an idea that does not imply any cultural specificity, but rather a preference; • Linguistic elements: they’re based on linguistic features that aim to produce a comic effect; • Para-linguistic elements: they’re significant enough for them to constitute their own category alongside paralinguistic features, particularly in respect of audiovisual texts, such as silence; • Visual elements: they comprise all the potentially humorous instances produced by what we can see on the screen; • Graphic elements: they include the humor derived from any written message inserted into a screen picture; • Acoustic elements: they’re sounds (including music) which may be humorous; • Non-marked humorous elements: they embrace diverse instances that are not easily bracketed in one of the other categories but are potentially humorous; Regarding the issue of how humor travels in audiovisual texts, drawing on Martinez Sierra (2008) the idea was suggested that, although certain types of humorous elements seem to have their own identity and can transmit content and meaning by themselves, others seem to work as vehicles. Therefore, it may be useful to distinguish between content elements and vehicular elements that evoke a certain humorous situation. Some clarification regarding visual elements also seem necessary. They can be divided into: • Iconographic codes: Chaume (2004) considers these ‘the most relevant code transmitted via the visual channel’. Icons, indices and symbols are to be dealt with in the translation of a given text, although they’re not translated linguistically; • Photographic codes: they refer to changing in lighting, in perspective, or in the use of color. Therefore, if there’s an intentional use of color- for example, to generate a given humorous effect- it should be mentioned at some point; • Planning codes: Chaume (2004) comments these codes as especially relevant in modes such as dubbing, since it implies phonetic or lip-synchrony if the impression of verisimilitude is to be maintained, and can be of interest in subtitling; • Mobility codes: they identify ‘proximity and articulation’ depending on how relevant distance is to the plot or in creating humor; • Graphic codes: these codes affect the written language that can appear on the screen, which are typically translated via a subtle or an off-screen voice; • Syntactic codes (editing): Chaume (2004) explains that these codes can help the translator to better understand the audiovisual text, although they’re usually excluded when it comes to AD (i.e fade-outs, wipe-offs, juxtapositions); JOKES AS PROTOTYPES It is useful to use the concept of ‘prototype’ proposed by Snell-Hornby (1988). Hence, we can understand jokes as continuums where there are no hermetic types but prototypes (the elements) whose borders intermingle with other prototypical categories (other elements). Thus, it is possible for humorous effects to arise not only from the presence of a non- marked element but also from the coincidence of a non-marked element and a visual one. On many occasions, the full enjoyment of a joke will be based precisely on the ability of the viewer to access the information generated in that area (pag. 186). From 2016 onwards “meme” outdid all the competing terms and continued its ascending trend. From the perspective of diachronic linguistics, particularly diachronic lexicology studies, one could speculate that the term “meme” might replace the term “humour” in the future. Clearly, when meme travel, it is primarily the verbal language that is manipulated, but not always (ex. Daenerys’s Italian version of the meme that, in place of irony, plays on her squint as if she were short-sided thus playing on its literal aspect, pag. 15). These solutions aren’t what Jakobson defined as ‘proper translation’ as there was no text to translate in the first place. They are, however, intersemiotic translations in their attempt to provide words that give sense to an image (the visual code). What counts is its recognition as being simultaneously aimed at a global audience and at a niche thus being both inclusive and divisive. That’s because language adds another layer to this patterns of understanding and it makes us feel as we belong and that we share the same view with others. Therefore, the more you know, the more you’ll get. Digital communication underscores how words are just one part of interaction, something that is also the case in real life but most evident in computer-mediated communication that appears to be becoming ever more visual and less verbal (i.e emoticons). Adami and Ramos Pinto (2019) point out that meanings are multimodally orchestrated yet only a small number of signs, namely those related to verbal language are translated. Furthermore, images are every bit as important as words and are inter-dependent: neither is more important than the other. As we said, Nissenbaum and Shifman (2018), adopting big data, have clearly established that most memes appear to be US based or at least Western based. The various international manipulation of the same meme will presumably be meaningless to people who acquainted with Italian politics (pag. 20). Artefacts such as memes highlight the importance of turning to Multimodal Studies for acceptable analytical frameworks (Kress, 2010). Adami and Ramos Pinto (2019) have stated that this might lead to a ‘standardization of meaning-making practices in favor of Western practices while pushing divergent practices to the periphery, which we have more difficulty accessing and interpreting’ (ex. Donald Trump’s meme and Giuseppe Conte’s meme, pag.21). This is true of most memes that originate in Italy, which often rely heavily on verbal language and therefore do not travel easily beyond the country’s borders. Bilingual puns work no differently online than in the real world (‘Soy milk’, pag. 24). Of greater interest are the ‘Linguistic Differences’ memes illustrating various stereotypes or misperceptions associated with Western languages and their phonetic systems. The humour is usually centered around a single word or a phrase that is phonetically translated into multiple languages (ex. pag.25-26) which often tend to poke fun at a certain language (mostly German) or certain dialectal differences of the same language (differences between UK and US English, pag.26). In Western culture, the principal metaphor for translation is that of transfer, which conceals a quest for equivalence that cannot and does not work in the disorderly domain of humour. Memes seem to replicate themselves in different languages like a close-knit pattern in which it is impossible to discern the first stich. It is not only the verbal content that changes because images can be manipulated too. However, while the verbal content may be strikingly diverse from locale to locale, the original meme of reference will always be recognisable. FROM TRANSLATION TO TRANSCREATION OF MEMES There are numerous studies on humour which define, categorize and discuss the role of humour has always played in society. In general, humour can be defined as ‘involuntary occurences’ or deliberately (re)created situations when anyone or several of the linguistic, situational, social, cultural, behavioural or communication patterns are ‘faulted’. Modern technologies represent an important factor in the spreading of humour. With the introduction of texts and audio, hence the possibility to include other types of humour, the need for translation also appeared. Therefore, technology such as cinema and radio enhanced the increasing circulation of information and entertainment. Cinema and television were the first forms of multimodal media; hence translation further evolved from text and/or audio to audiovisual translation. With the rise of Internet and later on free social media, the production of these artifacts was no longer prohibitive for the masses. Therefore, the ability to both reproduce and distribute them, whether they’re simple or complex is now at any digital user’s fingertips. Nowadays, social networks are the optimum medium to facilitate the fast spread and transcendence of humour from one community to another and it definitely requires some type of some degree of translation. Humour translation is often a difficult task. The more sophisticated and culture-specific the humour, the more difficult it is to translate. This is where Translation Studies (TS) come into play. The term ‘transcreation’ has entered the mainstream of translation studies since 2010. While the advertising industry defines it from a marketing perspective, TS scholars bring it closer to game localization or GILT processes. Put more simply, transcreation is a particular type of translation that includes creativity, adaption, particularization and emotional transfer that occurs in a multimodal environment. Translation can be: • Monomodal, with the subdivision of non-textual (elements that do not use language as a means of transferring meaning) or textual (the use of language as a means of transferring meaning); • Multimodal, which includes both elements; In the case of humour, there are various degrees of meaning transfer, from zero-translation to transcreation and ‘copycatting’, which refers to a completely recreated outcome in the target culture by often recontextualizing it. Clearly, it is easier to understand monomodal means of humour (ex. image of the praying cat, pag. 57) while the more complex a humorous artefact is, the more difficult it is to transfer it from one culture-language pair to another. Many scholars proposed to classify types of transcreation variation of humorous artefacts as ranging from zero-translation or non- translation to transcreation. Other definitions of memes were: • Shifman (2014) defines memes as “(a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance; (b) that were created with awareness of each other; and (c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the Internet by many users”. • Oxford University Dictionary: ‘An image, video, piece of text, etc., typically humorous in nature, that is copied and spread rapidly by Internet users, often with slight variations’; One important characteristics of memes is their ability to replicate. Replicability can involve content, form or stance, or combinations of all of these. ZERO TRANSLATION The term zero-translation refers to words that do not require translation as the signified and the signifier pair is the same in both the ST and TT. However, is not to be confused with ‘literal translation’ as in the case of the latter word-for-word translation is involved. Therefore, simple images, animated GIFs and video sequences do not require translation to be considered suitable for sharing with speakers of different languages and members of different cultures. They do not need any type of meaning transfer for their humorous intent to be understood by the target culture. Furthermore, zero-translation humour cam also appear in specialized online communities that share similar interests: IT specialists, designers, professors, former students from a particular field of study and so on, who speak the source language and are knowledgeable about the source culture. PARTIAL TRANSLATION AND FULL TRANSLATION (66-68) Partial translation is content that combines elements from the source culture, source language, target culture and target language in its output. These elements depend heavily on the similarities or dissimilarities of the source and the target language-culture pairs, on the specifics of the online community to which the content is addressed and on the multimodal skills of the person dealing with the transfer of the humorous content. These meaning transfers can appear in both static and animated pictures, sequences or videos. As for textual elements, social media are preponderantly used by the younger generation, who are more likely to be permissive and tolerant of accepting foreign elements. This is a direct consequence of the globalized world all of us are a part of. Another important element is the existence of bilingual and multilingual communities in various areas of the world. There are often two levels of agency: the humor executioner (internal to the ad) and the ultimate humor agent, the advertiser. The object or target of the humor can be internal or external, such as an ethnic group, a well-known individual or a celebrity. It is the audience who decides whether an ad is funny and to what extent. Not all countries or cultures use the same humor devices. Weinberger and Spotts (1989) have established six types of humor used in the US and the UK: irony, jokes, the ludicrous, satire, understatement and wordplay. However, the most frequent humor device used in advertising across different cultural is incongruity: that is, the clash between the expected and the unexpected. Translators will have to carry out a pragmatic and functional analysis of such elements, from which they’ll be able to develop strategies aimed at achieving a new version that at least produces a similar effect in the target language/target culture receiver. Therefore, they have to carefully weigh up the humor element both from the inside and from the outside by detaching himself from strictly textual aspects in order to achieve a communicative, functional equivalence. Translators may encounter coherence and/or cohesion problems related to text-constraining elements in which event alternative translation strategies will be required. The linguistic component of humor cannot be isolated from the cultural one. In fact, humor is constrained by these two components, which indicates that there must be a common knowledge or experience shared by the source text/language/culture author and the target/receiver. Furthermore, the degree of successful transfer depends above all on the complex relations between all three components. Plus, commonality is a dynamic parameter and shifts among groups. VARIABLES IN AUDIOVISUAL HUMOR TRANSFER Advertising translation is a mode of constrained translation, where the verbal elements are only a small part of the whole text. In the case of audiovisual advertising, factors which heavily constrain the message are the ‘image’, ‘noise’, ‘diachrony’ (the effect of context and the space- time variables on the text and its translation) and ‘taboo humour’. The translation mode used is of paramount importance in audiovisual advertising. Traditionally, dubbing is the chosen method although subtitling is increasingly being used in countries such as Spain since it’s seen as a marketing solution. In audiovisual translation, there is a dynamic, moving visual framework which shapes the communicative transfer from a given language to another: the image. They become the pivotal component of the comic scene and the translator will have to transpose the comic load on to it, carefully avoiding cultural clashes that may arise for the target audience. Occasionally, humor may stem from the unexpected presence of subtitles covering the actress’s face, which may produce laughter at marketing. Besides the various classifications of humor, Fuentes-Luque (2000) proposed a simple taxonomy of humor for translation purposes, distinguishing between plays on words (related to language) and plays on ideas (humor related to context). Plays on ideas are not universally transferable, since they may stem from culture-bound concepts. In most cases, the receiver doesn’t know what the joke is about. Scholar have distinguished four main options translators have: 1. Literal translation: comic reaction in the source text (ST) receiver; 2. Explanatory translation: the meaning is correctly transferred but there is a loss of humor; 3. Compensatory translation: this producer works at a more macro-textual level, that is by transposing humor at another point; 4. Effective or functional translation: in the form of complete reformulation of the joke; 5. There could be yet another superior stadium where the translator manages to exceed the ST comic situation, introducing verbal and cultural references close to the TT receivers’ cognitive background, in a successful attempt to prioritize the text’s objectives. As Martinez and Sierra and Zabalbeascoa (2017) point out ‘further attention must also be paid towards taboo humor as a translational factor, including, among others, offensiveness and cursing’. Language is also part of the strategy to confront taboo, which can turn out to be either positive or negative (see examples at pag.84). The degree of identification with the product directly relates to cultural permeability, that is, to the extent to which the viewer recognizes the cultural elements in the commercial. Intertextual relations, source language references and celebrities are exploited to make the product and the advertisement more effective for the audience. Intertextuality is certainly one of the most widely used strategies in audiovisual advertising. Allusions are typically used in audiovisual productions and in audiovisual advertising humor. References to famous films, characters, values, traditions and so on are recurrent strategies in spots and pose an added difficulty for translation. Since allusions and cultural references rely on collective assumptions, what is significant to one culture might not be for another on. Nevertheless, allusions seem to be travelling more easily because of globalization and the spread of Internet (examples at pag. 86). Frequently in advertising, there is no ST but just a general TT aimed at different markets, without taking into account the potential cultural barriers of the TT reader’s expectations. Translators are all too often left out of the TT production process and overlooked as intercultural experts and mediators. The consequence is that the TT may not fulfil its functional purpose and therefore the potential success of message reception in the target culture/country will not be achieved. Hence, the need to incorporate translators in the creative process is necessary. Some scholars take a step further and talk about “trans-creators”, who are professionals with a profile of ‘a trained translator with expertise in content localization and with creative awareness’. In order to fulfil their role efficiently, trans-creators need to have in-depth knowledge of the source culture in order to ‘dissect’ it so that the translated text will have a successful reception in the target culture. Nowadays, the traditional obsession with loyalty to the source text often spoils the comic effect, dissipating the original function and intention of the text, especially of humorous audiovisual texts and paving the way to long-term fossilization processes. As Rowe (1960) said ‘the intensity of the audience reaction to a comic line is far more important than any literary fidelity to the original sense’. AMATEUR DUBBING TO PROMOTE WELL-BEING AMONG HOSPITALISED CHILDREN The introduction of sound led to the so-called ‘talking films’. Despite the initial disconcert, talking films quickly became the norm and this led to the introduction of ‘doubling’, currently known as dubbing, to reproduce movies in European countries. This improvement in dubbing became object of studying for many scholars and it is nowadays referred as ‘audiovisual translation’ (AVT). Because of the rapid use of Internet and technology, ‘amateur dubbing’ has become equally popular among the so called ‘prosumers’, that is consumers who become producers when it comes to translating a set tv show or movie and therefore became active participants in shaping and transferring audiovisual content (i.e ‘fandubbing’ or ‘fundubbing’). In doing so, ‘prosumers’ release themselves from ‘the pressure to meet the quality standards of commercially-produced dubbed material’. Drawing on Diaz-Cintas definition, Banos (2019) proposes the term ‘cyberdubbing’ to define the wide range of non-standard dubbing practices found in cyberspace. One particular type of cyberdubbing is ‘altruist dubbing’, which is created to provide education, knowledge, content to children and young people and was therefore employed to promote well-being in hospitalized situations. Hospitalization may negatively affect children and young people both physically and psychologically speaking. As a result, children and their families might develop high levels of anxiety and fear that can dramatically affect their general well-being and quality of life. In this complex situation, the medical staff play a key role as they try to understand their patient and family’s social demands. Therefore, their aim is to reduce stress, anxiety by actively promoting the expression of feelings through imagination, distraction and humor. Hospitals such as Meyer Children’s Hospital (Italy, 1884) first adopted this method through clowning activity, interactions with animals and music. Over the last few years, this hospital has started a series of amateur dubbing workshops and activities. Thanks to this seminar, children are free to experiment according to their individual skills. They’re not passive recipients but become actively engaged in the process. It is a way to cope with pain and enhance anxiety management and well-being. Therefore, amateur dubbing can be considered a non-pharmacological technique whose primary aim is for participants to learn by doing and entertain, support and amuse hospitalized children. They can learn dubbing techniques, act like movie characters and express their emotions and thoughts by also making the whole hospital experience less frightening (see pages 165-168 for technical explanation).