¿Se mantiene la comicidad? El humor en la subtitulación sueca de Torrente, un éxito de ventas en España

Abstract

To investigate how GTVH (General Theory of Verbal Humor, by Salvatore Attardo) could be used to determine the quality of the humor translation of a local ‘blockbuster’ in Spain, we analyzed the original script of Torrente, el brazo tonto de la ley (1998) and compared it with the Swedish translation of Torrente, lagens dumma arm (1999). Because the Swedish translation was only available in subtitles, we resorted to using complementary theory on subtitling for analyzing the subtitles of Torrente as GTVH mainly focuses on jokes and not necessarily audiovisual media such as movies. A corpus of 10 humorous extracts was gathered and then subjected to a qualitative analysis using the application of GTVH to humor translation. We found that the 6 hierarchically organized parameters that compose GTVH, named Knowledge Resources, were used in the Swedish subtitles when translating the humorous parts of Torrente. GTVH proved satisfactory as a joke-type translating tool, and allowed us to perceive differences in the humor translation through the help of its Similarity Metric. However, not all humor in a movie is cast in the form of jokes, so GTVH could not be used as a ‘complete’ translating tool. The Knowledge Resource Logical Mechanism proved notably troublesome to apply to the humor of Torrente. For cultural references in the form of Metalinguistic jokes, secondary sources need also be consulted. Palabras