Translation of Humour in Media From English Speech to Swedish Subtitles: A Pilot Study of Selected Episodes in the Sitcom Friends

Abstract

The aim of this pilot study is to analyse the translation of humour in selected episodes in the American sitcom Friends from speech to Swedish subtitles in terms of linguistic and cultural aspects. The study was conducted qualitatively by choosing several episodes and thoroughly analysing the translation of linguistic and culture-specific features in order to explore what strategies of translation were implemented on different kinds of jokes, noting the constraints of interlingual subtitling. For linguistic jokes, a word-for-word strategy was used, as the morphology, syntax and lexis of Swedish language allowed it. The humorous utterances that included idiom and cultural-reference, on the other hand, did not allow the same strategy, as it would lead to misunderstandings. Neither could an equivalent expression be used, as it did not exist in Swedish. Overall, the findings were that an appropriate translation strategy for linguistic jokes between English and Swedish that preserves both the linguistic ambiguity and the humour is word-for-word, while in the translation of idioms and cultural references, literal translation causes loss of humour.