Subtitling Irony

Abstract

Whereas the exact nature of the relation between humour and verbal irony has not been fully established yet, humour has often been seen as one of the important ‘functions’ of irony. In this study we set out to examine empirically how humorous irony fares in the constrained form of translation that subtitling is, and whether these observations can be related to known humour translation and subtitling strategies. Drawing on a speech act approach to irony we studied 211 humorous ironic utterances and their Dutch subtitles from twelve episodes of the ‘Blackadder’ series (‘Blackadder II’ and ‘Blackadder the Third’). While a quantitative approach shows that nearly all these subtitles retain some degree of ironic potential, we also find that in about two thirds of these cases verbal ironic cues are influenced by the translation in interesting ways. A qualitative analysis shows that on the whole the Dutch subtitles are often more explicitly critical. This means that from the known strategies of irony translation only a few turned out to be very important in these data. Part of this could be explained by subtitling strategies reported in the literature, which generally seem to work against the preservation of a particular kind of ironic cues, i.e. those that we found to have an interpersonal rather than referential function.

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