Translation of Humor in Animated Movies. Audiovisual Translation, Challenges and Analysis of the Animated Movies

Master's Thesis , 2022 , 62 Pages

Communications - Movies and Television

The present thesis involves a theoretical and practical examination of the translation of humor. The study provides a knowledge base that includes diverse types of humor and jokes, cultural reference translation approaches, and a brief introduction to dubbing. This theoretical component is represented in the analysis of selected animated movies, in which some fragments from the original version are contrasted to portions that have previously been translated and dubbed into Albanian. This research demonstrates the many approaches used by the translator during the procedure as well as the potential issues that may arise. This project demonstrates that language and cultural mixing between two countries is difficult.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments Plagiarism Statement Abstract

Introduction
1.1 Objectives, Reasons for working on this topic
1.2 Research Questions
1.3 Problem statement
1.4 Purpose of the study

Chapter 1. Humor, Definitions and Theories
1.1 Humor
1.1.1 Different Definitions of Humor
1.2 Linguistic Theories of Humor
1.2.1 Salvatore Attardo's Theories of Humor Translation
1.2.2 Jeroen Vandaele's Humor in Translation
1.2.3 Eugene Nida's Formal and Dynamic Equivalence

Chapter 2. Audiovisual Translation and Challenges
2.1 Humor in animated movies
2.2 Translation for Children
2.3 Audiovisual Translation
2.3.1 Types of Audiovisual Translation
2.4 Challenges in Translating Humor
2.4.1 Cultural References
2.4.2 Verbal and Referential Humor
2.4.2.1 Verbal Humor
2.4.2.2 Puns and Allusions
2.4.3 Graphic Elements

Chapter 3. Analysis of the animated movies
3.1. Shrek Background
3.2. Humour Translation Problems
3.3. Madagascar Background
3.4. Humour Translation Problems
3.5. Megamind Background
3.6. Humour Translation Problems

Conclusion

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Dr. Viktor Ristani, for his guidance and patience throughout this project. I would also like to thank my friends and family for encouraging and supporting me whenever I needed them.

Abstract

The present thesis involves a theoretical and practical examination of the translation of humor. The study provides a knowledge base that includes diverse types of humor and jokes, cultural reference translation approaches, and a brief introduction to dubbing. This theoretical component is represented in the analysis of selected animated movies, in which some fragments from the original version are contrasted to portions that have previously been translated and dubbed into Albanian. This research demonstrates the many approaches used by the translator during the procedure as well as the potential issues that may arise. This project demonstrates that language and cultural mixing between two countries is difficult.

Introduction

1.1 Objectives, Reasons for working on this topic:

Humor is also one of the major challenges a translator faces, especially when extra linguistic elements are involved, such as a foreign culture. Even though humor can be considered to be fairly universal, the fact is that each culture has its own, and most of the time one culture's humor is hard to understand for others. The main objective of this study is to provide some information about humor and humor translation in order to have some background knowledge for the analysis. The other objective is to analyze selected fragments of the animated movies on the basis of the previous theoretical part.

1.2 Research Questions

The main research question of the study was to determine to what extent the linguistic humour in children's animated movies is preserved in the translated text, and furthermore, in case of a reduction, to determine if the tendency of the translators was towards preserving the humour in general, or omitting the humour altogether. To be able to answer these questions, initially, three animated movies released between the years of 2001-2011 were chosen. The movies were analyzed in order to filter out the linguistic humour. The translations of the linguistic humour instances were analyzed in terms of the preservation and loss of humour. More precisely, to study fragment by fragment the context of each scene, what process the translator followed and what problems were encountered.

1.3 Problem statement

The problem of studying humor translation is that it has received relatively little attention, and that theoretical research is very difficult. Also, analyzing humour is very due to its cultural- situational peculiarity and its need for creativity.

1.4 Purpose of the study

The purpose of this thesis is to gain a better knowledge of the difficulties a translator experiences when working on humor translation. Since it is a field of interest for me, through this project I intend to develop a guideline for overcoming challenges that may arise while translating humour in works intended for both children and adults.

Chapter I Humor, Definitions and Theories

1.1. Humor

If someone were to define what humor is, they would say it includes everything that makes people laugh. Laughter means that some sort of content has been created and mediated symbolically by a recipient. This content may generate a surprise, an uncertainty or insight making an audience laugh. But what makes one person laugh, will not necessarily be that funny to another. So obviously, there are many more factors involved. Humor is a phenomenon that all the people in the world know and use. In general, humor may be defined as all words, situations, occurrences that provide amusement or evoke laughter. Some dictionaries offer simple definitions that can be considered a starting point when analyzing the word ‘humor' as it is used nowadays.

1.1.1 Different Definitions of Humor

As humor is the main topic of interest in this thesis, it is imperative to understand humor. Funny enough, one of the most challenging questions about humor has been the most basic: "What is humor?" It's been so difficult to come up with a pre-theoretical concept of humor that some scholars think it's impossible to define. Many philosophers have studied and attempted to define it. As far back as ancient Greece times, Plato theorized humor and laughter. In one of his works, he showed disdain toward the classical work The Odyssey for its reference to Mount Olympus ringing with laughter; Plato says, “if anyone represents men of worth as overpowered by laughter, we must not accept it, much less if gods” (Hamilton & Cairns,1961). In another work, Plato goes as far as saying that laughter is evil. In the 20th century, this idea was called the Superiority Theory. Rather than defining humor in general, the superiority theory explains the nature and value of some comedy, allows us to differentiate between different kinds of humor experiences, and articulates some difficulties and arguments about the ethics and etiquette of some humor. Despite how evident the superiority hypothesis's proper role is upon reflection, it is frequently presented as a stand-alone, comprehensive theory of humor.

The word “humor” as we use it today was used for the first time in 1709. In Shaftesbury's An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humor, humor is depicted as something not evil. In fact, Shaftesbury (1773) says that humor is a natural part of human nature, and serves the function of releasing nervous energy. This concept has come to be known as the Relief Theory, from the understanding that people laugh in order to relieve tension that is built up inside every individual. After numerous variants of the Relief Theory, we may observe that hardly no philosopher or psychologist today explains laughter or humor as a release of pent-up nervous energy. There is, without a doubt, a link between laughter and energy expenditure. Many muscle groups and parts of the neurological system are involved in hearty laughter. Our lungs also get a workout when we laugh hard because we take in significantly more oxygen than usual. However, few current experts argue that the energy expended in laughter is the energy of feeling emotions, repressing emotions, or thinking, all of which have piled up and need to be released.

The Incongruity Theory has become a dominant way of understanding humor. James Beattie (Essays on Poetry and Music, 1779) was the first to coin the term incongruity, which is meant to mean something that is found humorous because it violates one's mental expectations. The difference between Beattie's and Plato's views of humor is that where Plato considered humor harmful, Beattie found it necessary. This style of joking is comparable to stand-up comedians' humor today. They have a setup and punchline. The first portion of the joke is the set-up: it sets the tone, creates expectation. The last part, the punchline, defies it. The joke's ending is incongruous with the beginning, according to the Incongruity Theory. This theory has become the most widely accepted theory on humor today.

We could say that the incongruity theory concentrates on the cognitive components of comedic amusement, superiority on the emotive, and relief on the physical. Superiority and relief theories “seem more concerned with the mechanisms of the humorous reaction than with its conceptual core. Thus, these competitors of incongruity theory are currently seen as even less able to provide an adequate answer to the basic question” (Levinson, 564)

The Longman Dictionary of contemporary English defines humor as

1. the ability or tendency to think that things are funny, or funny things you say that show you have this ability
2. the quality in something that makes it funny and makes people laugh.

Vandaele (“The Translator”, 153) has also noted that humor is part of our linguistic exchanges, to the point that we are not even aware of its presence in our daily communications:

“Humor is used in everyday parlance to refer simultaneously to an effect and its contextual causes, an occurrence so normalized that we don't even notice it.” Based on this definition, humor can be considered an effect, expressed verbally and non-verbally.

Physical laughter or smiling, as a reaction that appears to be a clear outcome of a psychological reality, usually make the ordinary language concept of humor seem obvious. Since humor, or the feeling it evokes, is easy to detect, nobody can't deny the presence of humor in a certain situation. Still, what seems obvious for common sense is in fact quite intricate when one has to define humor as an object of study.

Many translation scholars provided their own definitions of humor.

According to Walter Nash (“The Language of Humor”, 26), humor has three principles:

a) A “genus” or derivation in culture, institutions, attitudes, beliefs, typical practices, characteristic artifacts etc.
b) A characteristic design, presentation, or verbal packaging by virtue of which the humorous intention is indicated and is recognized.
c) A locus in language, some word or phrase that is indispensable to the joke.

Vandaele explains that: “humor is what causes amusement, mirth, a spontaneous smile and laughter” (Handbook of Translation Studies, 147). And he also adds that it has an exteriorized manifestation. According to him “the task of defining humor has driven some desperate scholars to give up on any attempt at defining humor”.

From a holistic standpoint, the nature of humor can be defined and articulated. Raskin explains this phenomenon by listing the most important ideas in the subject that have grown over centuries: as a ridicule of a human fault or error, but not too serious, because then it would not be an appropriate cause for laughter (Aristotle), as an exhibition of superiority over somebody else but again, not too serious (Stendhal), as an attempt to abase, denigrate a person or a cause of high stature (Bain) or to lower a value (Propp, Stern), as a metamorphosis of tense expectation into nothing (Kant), as a switch of one's mind and attention from something big and significant to something small and insignificant (Spencer), as an incongruent treatment of things, in deviation from the customary norm (Hegel, Schopenhauer)

Since the end of the 1980s, humor has been recognized as a component of artistic production and a subject deserving of thorough investigation (Vandaele 2001). However, because of the lack of a terminological consensus, the meaning of humor has become more difficult to define, resulting in a variety of distinct definitions, some of which have been mentioned above. As a result, defining humor is dependent on the context in which it is employed.

Literary criticism, for example, requires a precise classification of this idea, whereas linguists have used larger definitions as the beginning point for their research, analyzing whatever appears to be funny or makes us laugh. humor is determined by the effect it has on the audience. By viewing humor as a text whose perlocutionary or intended consequence is laughing, the pragmatic approach has resulted in a more meaningful conversation.

I think that the common formulas of translation don't really apply when translating humor, because even if the message is translated perfectly there's no guarantee that the humor will come across. And that's why many think that humor is untranslatable.

1.2. Linguistic Theories of Humor Translation

When reading the literature on humor studies it is clear that there are numerous theories which attempt to define humor and explain why we laugh. In fact, all of the proposed theories of humor have limitations and deficiencies, yet each theory has contributed to our understanding of humor. Cicero's treatise on oration, De oratore, is the first text that may be called a linguistic examination of the phenomena of humor. Cicero studied humor and divided it into two types, which we now call situational comedy and cognitive linguistic humor (wordplay). He thought the former had humor "contained in the thing," whereas the latter had humor "contained in the words." Cicero added to the humor taxonomy by outlining various varieties of humor that fall into the two primary categories (Attardo 1994).

Albeit not expected as an investigation of humor, Paul Grice's (Grice, 1975) investigation of pragmatics fills in as a solid groundwork and early clarification of the overall semantic hypothesis of incongruity. In 1975, Grice developed the possibility of the co-operative principle, a bundle of assumptions with respect to any audience in a discussion regarding what kind of conversational standards the individual can anticipate that the speaker should follow. These principles, or maxims, take into consideration what is known as real discourse, discourse where both the audience and the speaker anticipate that these maxims should be followed. These maxims are

(a) Maxim of Quality. Make your contribution true; do not convey what you believe false.
(b) Maxim of Quantity. Be as informative as required.
(c) Maxim of Relation. Be relevant.
(d) Maxim of Manner. Be clear; so, avoid obscurity and ambiguity, and strive for brevity and order

Though Grice's implicatures are wide and meant for general conversational use rather than comedy study, they provide a solid place to start with modern semantic incongruity theory. Many jokes rely on the listener's disappointment when they expect the speaker to follow Gricean rules. The listener fills in any non-explicit information he can through implicatures during the "setup" of the joke. With a few words, the punchline exposes that the speaker was in fact using a meaning of the sentence that contradicts one of Grice's maxims.

In the 1970s, Hans J. Vermeers proposed the Skopos theory, which was later expanded by Reiss and Vermeer in 1984. The goal and purpose of translation are given precedence in this theory, which dictates the translation procedures to produce a text with the same function as it has on ST. The following are the basic rules of this theory: 1) a translatum (or TT) is determined by its skopos; 2) a TT is an offer of information in a target culture; 3) a TT does not initiate an offer of information in a clearly reversible way; 4) a TT must be internally coherent; 5) a TT must be coherent with the ST; 6) the five rules above are listed in hierarchical order, with the skopos rule (Reiss and Vermeer 1984 cited in Munday, 2008, p. 119). Translators use any tactics that are compatible with their situation to transfer the translation's goal and replicate the same function of the ST in the target language, as inspired by skopos theory. In the case of humor in audiovisual translation, translators are free to use any method and make any relevant decisions, such as substituting the humor with another equivalent humor in TT or even creating a new humor in accordance with the context, as long as the goal of the translation is to transfer humorous expressions.

Two of the most influential linguistic theories of humor are the semantic script theory of humor (SSTH), which was formulated by Raskin (1985), and the general theory of verbal humor (GTVH), which was developed by Salvatore Attardo and Victor Raskin (1991). In this case the focus will be on Attardo's “General Theory of Verbal Humor”, Vandaele's “Humor Translation” and Nida's Formal and Dynamic Equivalence.

1.2.1. Salvatore Attardo General Theory of Verbal Humor

This theory, along with Raskin's Semantic-Script Theory of Humor have been defined as the “two most influential linguistic humor theories of the last two decades” (“Cognitive Linguistic Approaches to Humor”, 2). Raskin was the first to identify his approach to humor as linguistic. His script-based semantic theory of humor (SSTH) does not cover humor in general, but only verbal humor, or what is called “punchline jokes”. This theory is basically focused on the linguistic translation approach of humor. The main hypothesis of SSTH as stated by Raskin (1985: 99) is that “A text can be characterized as a single-joke-carrying text if both of the conditions are satisfied. These conditions being: i) The text is compatible, fully or in part, with two different scripts. ii) The two scripts with which the text is compatible are opposite [...]. The two scripts with which some text is compatible are said to overlap fully or in part on this text”. This hypothesis suggests that a joke has an initial part and a last part. The initial part is subject to two interpretations in which one is more apparent than the other. Surprisingly, the second interpretation is brought by the last part of the joke to the audience's consciousness. Raskin indicates that the two scripts should be opposed through situational, contextual or local antonyms. His suggestions for applying the GTVH to translation only takes into consideration joke-texts but cannot be applied to other forms of humor.

According to script-based theory of humor developed by Raskin and Attardo, the mechanism of humor production involves conflicting knowledge representations. A ‘script' is an organized chunk of information about something, a cognitive structure internalized by the speaker which provides them with information on how the world is organized, including how one acts in it; in the broadest sense it is an object (real or imaginary), an event, an action, a quality etc. (Attardo 2002, 181). This definition was later partly altered by Attardo, or at least the social aspect of the notion was highlighted: [scripts are]... collections of semantic information pertaining to a given subject... [embodying] the sum total of the cultural knowledge of a society, which can be represented as a set of expectations and/or weighted choices. (Attardo 1997:402)

The scope of Raskins theory has been broadened by Attardo. Jokes - the main object of study for Attardo - are based on script opposition/incongruity, the use of words which trigger disparate readings, as they are associated with one or more scripts, or packaging of information. Salvatore Attardo, professor at Texas A&M University and the editor-in-chief of “Humor”, expanded the STH through an introduction of five other knowledge resources (KRs) in addition to script opposition (SO) that was previously presented in Raskin's SST. The following parameters will help the translator decode humor:

1. LOGICAL MECHANISM (LM): the most problematic parameter according to Attardo, the resolution of the incongruity present in the joke (Attardo 1997:409-415). It consists of the incompatibility of the joke, the way the joke is organized; it may be two scripts juxtaposed, false analogies, irony etc. Since some type of humor is nonsense or absurd and does not require resolution, it is also another optional parameter. He thinks that LMs are easily translatable.
2. SCRIPT OPPOSITION (SO): if two jokes differ in Script Opposition then they are different jokes. So, the translator will not change Script Opposition unless it is unavailable in the TL. The most abstract Knowledge Resource according to him.
3. LANGUAGE (LA): refers to choices on the phonetic, phonological, morphophonemic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic levels, which determine the entire makeup of the joke. It is the linguistic material for the verbalization of a text, the words a joke is made of. It's important to recognize that the same idea or information can be expressed in a number of different ways. As a result, jokes or humorous stories can be rewritten, delivered, or written in a variety of ways while maintaining the same meaning and effect. He suggests a literal translation.
4. SITUATION (SI): people, objects or instruments needed for the joke to function, the “props” on which the joke relies on. Basically, what the joke is about. If the situation does not exist or makes sense in TL, then it should be replaced.
5. TARGET (TA): entails the individuals, groups or the parties in general which are in some way attacked by the humorist groups or individuals with humorous stereotypes attached to each who are the target of the joke.
6. NARRATIVE STRATEGY (NS): is the micro-genre of the joke. It refers to the narrative organization of the joke, dialogue, riddle, simple narrative etc. If the narrative is unknown or irrelevant to the joke, the translator can use a different narrative strategy.

The different knowledge resources are hierarchically organized (Attardo 1994:227):

illustration not visible in this excerpt

Attardo provides a minitheory of humor translation based on the General Theory of Verbal Humor, with practical guidance for translators who may encounter humorous texts: “if possible, respect all six Knowledge Resources in your translation, but, if necessary, let your translation differ at the lowest level necessary for your pragmatic purposes” (Attardo 2002: 183). He admits that respecting all Knowledge Resources may be unrealistic, but if none of them are honored, the result cannot be termed a translation “and may be either the refusal or acknowledged failure of the translator to render the text in TL, or the creation of humor in TL that was not in SL, or failure of the translator to spot the joke in SL” (ibid: 184).

Still, as Attardo has stressed, the production of a joke can be triggered by any knowledge resource, with the rest of them being filled in and the levels presented here ‘do not correspond to the consecutive stages of actual production' (Attardo and Raskin 1991:327). The model was developed as a formal tool of establishing how different or how similar two jokes can be intralingual; the higher up a difference is traced, the more dissimilar they will be (no value judgment is passed when ‘higher' and towards a model of describing humor translation, ‘lower' are used; the terms refer to the model's linearity) (Attardo 1994:228). This premise was taken a step further and applied to interlingual equivalence, that is, translation of jokes (Attardo 2002:184-192). A translated joke is an ideal translation when it shares the same script opposition (sexual vs. nonsexual readings), the same logical mechanism (analogy or role exchanges), the same situation, the same target (blondes) and the same narrative strategy as the original (language has to be necessarily changed when translating)

Attardo (1998: 233) indicates that GTVH can be applied to different types of humorous text, which range from simple jokes to any variety of media, including long narratives such as comic movies and television sitcoms. This mechanism of analyzing humor and translating is very literal; it focuses on the form and similarity of the joke rather than the message and intention. In most jokes you may need to change all the parameters so that the joke works in the TL. I would say it might not work as well as other theories because humorous texts involve different aspects other than words and meaning, like cultural references and extra linguistic factors.

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• Author: Danira Mushani (Author)
• Publication Year: 2022
• Pages: 62
• Catalog Number: V1361233
• ISBN (PDF): 9783346884657
• ISBN (Book): 9783346884664
• Language: English
• Tags: translation, humor, animated, movies, audiovisual, challenges, analysis