Professional Documents
Culture Documents
PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract. This paper examines Catalan and Spanish dubbed ver-
sions of English TV comedy series such as ‘Yes, Minister’, with
special attention to wordplay as a particular instance of the more
general problem of translating comedy for television. The objec-
tive is to show that producing foreign-language dubbed versions
of audiovisual texts has enough in common with other types of
translating assignments to be included within translation studies,
as well as contribute to the area of quality asssessment and evalu-
ation of translations by proposing that the criteria for judging a
translation should be clear, flexible and realistic, and should take
into account the translator’s limitations and working environment.
The paper also proposes a classification of jokes, with further
examples from translations of British situation comedy into
Catalan, and it presents the concept of ‘stylebook’ as a helpful bridge
between general statements about translation and specific
contextualized translating assignments.
Many people complain about the quality of existing translations or even con-
sider them ‘a necessary evil’, occasionally to the point of openly campaigning
against their very right to exist. Such negative evaluations often extend to the
dubbing of foreign films and television productions. Where could these value
judgements come from? Does the answer lie in the nature of language or should
explanations be looked for beyond grammar and semantics?
Every serious attempt at an unbiased assessment of the quality of a per-
formance or activity involves the setting up of clear criteria; it is generally assumed
that criteria are based, to a varying extent, on past experience and the
achievements of other human beings in the same or comparable circumstances.
It would therefore be relevant to ask how much dissatisfaction with transla-
tions is due to judgement deriving from criteria that are either highly demanding,
if not altogether unrealistic, or simply different from those by which the trans-
lation was produced. In this light, expressions such as ‘untranslatable’ or ‘bad
translation’ cannot be used meaningfully without specifying the criteria by
which the item or text is regarded as untranslatable or badly translated. So, we
would ought to say:
Let me begin by considering an extract from the opening scene of The Chal-
lenge, an episode of the BBC comedy series Yes, Minister. The fragment below
is taken from a radio interview between Ludovic Kennedy (LK), the reporter,
and James Hacker (JH), the Minister. The Catalan text is my own transcrip-
tion of the dubbed version for the national Catalan broadcasting company:
the personifications in the reporter’s first question, and the numerals are kept
intact as well. The consequence is that the humour of this exchange is more or
less left to its own fate, which in this particular case is as much as saying that
it simply does not seem to work. One may plausibly argue that the Catalan
version does not work as a humorous text, among other things, because one
assumes that the intended Catalan audience is incapable of grasping the full
implications of the names The Daily Mirror (a popular Brtish tabloid) and
Number Ten (the Prime Minister’s official residence at 10 Downing Street).
But why didn’t the translator realize this? Perhaps s/he assumed that the Cata-
lan audience could be expected to be familiar with these and other features of
British cultural lore. Another explanation might be that the translator missed
the joke and hence did not see that there was any problem in translating the
terms the way they appeared. Or the translator may have considered, or may
have been told, that proper nouns must be rendered in a certain manner regard-
less of context, function or other considerations. Or the translator may have
realized perfectly well that the solution was not wholly satisfactory but was
incapable of producing a better one through lack of time, incentive, tools or skill.
The translator’s rendering of verbal humour (or indeed, of any other source-
text feature) is bound to be influenced by such constraints, limitations, and
prior choices as I have referred to and which also seem to be hinted at by
the big if only at the beginning of the following quotation, in which Dirk Dela-
bastita (1994:226-28) sums up Ronald Landheer’s (1991) and Michel Ballard’s
(1991) optimisitc views on the possibility of successful pun translation:
The ‘if only’ in the above quote means that because of the difficulties involved
in translating wordplay (and, again, many other aspects of translation) a trans-
lator needs time and a certain amount of skill and expertise to think up a
satisfactory solution. What translators and trainees want to know is therefore
Patrick Zabalbeascoa 5
what skills, methods, rules, or techniques can help them attain that objective,
i.e. how to improve their performance.
However, it might be the case that the answer to this last question is not –
or not only – one which affects translators on an individual basis, but a more global
one, in the sense that other people would have to intervene and provide
the necessary support, even if the translator does have the final word (which is
not very often the case in the dubbing process). This is what I would like to
argue by complementing each of the points in the above quotation. First, if
excellent solutions can be or have been found, the translator would bene-
fit considerably from having relevant samples made available in some sort of
collection, reference book or data base; the closer the examples to the task at
hand, the better. Second, translators would need to know the full implications
of regarding the whole text as the most important unit of translation and be
able to exploit the context-dependent and purpose-oriented nature of transla-
tion; this requires that they understand how and why there may be many different
ways of translating the same source text. Third, different types of jokes and
other items may require individual strategies and solutions, although the trans-
lator will try to find a common thread that will lend coherence and a clear
sense of purpose to the target text. Basically, what this means is that a transla-
tor’s performance can improve if s/he has enough general and specific
information with which to work and enough time and skill to use it to his or her
full advantage. It also means that one of the most important factors in the trans-
lation of wordplay, of television comedy and many other texts is the kind of
environment, both materially and institutionally, in which the translation proc-
ess is carried out.
Given this principle, the question of the translatability of verbal humour
will tend to elude blanket assessments or universalistic claims. Let us con-
sider, for exmple, the possibility of the source text’s humour being
culture-specific, a feature often cited as a major obstacle to its successful trans-
lation and certainly one of the difficulties facing the translator of the above
excerpt from Yes, Minister. According to Delia Chiaro (1992), in Italy an im-
ported comedy series is only successful if the situation depicted is not too
culture-specific. To illustrate this claim she reports that George and Mildred
and Different Strokes, both serials dealing with middle-class life in general
without drawing too much on specifically British allusions or stereotypes, be-
came extremely successful in Italy, whereas Bless Me Father, which satirizes
aspects of the Anglican Church, was far too culture-specific to amuse Roman
Catholic Italy and was therefore relegated to off-peak viewing times on a small
channel (ibid:6). Similarly, Chiaro goes on to say, John Cleese’s hotelier (Fawlty
Towers), members of the French resistance (’Allo, ’Allo), and typical British
politicians and civil servants (Yes, Minister and its sequel Yes, Prime Minis-
ter) are all figures belonging to British culture which are instantly recognized
in their inflated parodied forms by home audiences, but outside the British
6 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
Isles they do not necessarily strike the viewer as being comic in intent (Chiaro
1992:7).
Even though the author gives no figures of these programme’s ratings abroad,
we have no reason to doubt the accuracy of Chiaro’s reports. It must be said,
however, that her explanations leave the reader wondering about the importance
of other factors. How can we know for sure that an Italian audience find
characters of the French resistance more alien than characters depicting a
middle-aged British couple? How successful were each of these programmes
in Britain and how long did they run? How many times were they repeated and
how well did each one of them sell abroad, for example in terms of profits and
popularity? Who was responsible for each of the translated versions? What is
the programming and dubbing policy in Italy? Why wouldn’t “Roman Catholic
Italy” actually be interested in a series like Bless Me Father, which also features
a Catholic priest trying to outdo his Anglican counterpart? In Catalonia - a
basically Roman Catholic and Mediterranean society, if such labels can be
used to mean anything, and where we might say that culture-specificity is a
comparable problem to the Italian context - the fact is that Fawlty Towers,
’Allo, ’Allo, and Yes, Minister have all been shown and even repeated quite
successfully several times, although they have never got into prime time on the
network’s main channel. Indeed, it must be said that British situation comedy
is never given prime time on the main Catalan channel, whereas American sit
coms such as Roseanne or Mad About You (which are arguably just as culture-
specific and difficult to translate) are given better slots. One of the few
exceptions to this norm was The The Black Adder, a highly culture-specific series
which parodically dramatizes certain episodes of the history of England.
Delia Chiaro points out that situation comedy rests very much on dramatic
irony and people’s misfortunes, two ingredients that she finds ‘translat-
able’. I submit that many of the problems she associates with the extent of
culture-specificity of humour may be linked to the concept of parody: after
all, beyond the parodic dimension, the problems of culture-specificity are com-
mon to many other types of translation in fields as wide apart as history books,
tourist guides, advertisements, literature and so on. It is in this light that Walter
Nash’s book The Language of Humour (1985) offers some interesting insights
into how one might deal with certain aspects of humour in translation, although
the book is not on translation as such.
Nash says that the test of good parody is not how closely it imitates or
reproduces certain turns of phrase, but how convincingly it generates a style
like that of the parodied author, producing the sort of phrases and sentences
s/he might have produced. This raises “the question of how we recognize a
parody or a parodic intention; for here, as in other forms of humour, laughter
depends on some sort of framework of expectancy” (ibid:87-88). For Nash,
Patrick Zabalbeascoa 7
even when the reader is not sure just what is being parodied, it may
still be possible to recognize parodic intention. The parodist takes
care as a rule to create notable discrepancies: both discrepancies of
‘fit’ between expression and content and discrepancies of style on
the plane of expression itself. (ibid:88; my emphasis)
We might expect the same to apply in the case of a dubbed version of a foreign
audiovisual text.
The two types of discrepancies mentioned by Nash could be illustrated by
the use of formal register in the discussion of a trivial subject and the insertion
of coloquial substandard words into a stylistically elevated text, respec-
tively. The kind of dissecting of the language of humour that Nash performs
throughout his book can be a very useful source of inspiration for the transla-
tor, since it enables us to look inside each joke, and even larger units, and
understand how they were put together, the better to translate them:
In the example from Yes, Minister in section 1, we might say that the main
difference between the English source text and the Catalan version is that,
although the content and the references are the same in both passages, it is
very difficult to grasp the parodic nature of the translation. Mr Town Hall and
Mr Whitehall are rendered flatly as “you are now in charge of local adminis-
tration as well as national administration” and this results in making the next
exchange between the Minister and his interviewer practically meaningless in
the dubbed version. The humour relies on the audience’s understanding that
the Minister thinks he is being flattered, whereupon the interviewer makes it
painfully clear that that is far from being the case: the terms were actually
coined by The Daily Mirror, a newspaper with a reputation for publishing
stories of scandal and sensation where political figures and other celebreties
are involved; this indicates, at least to an English audience, that the choice of
words was meant to criticize the Minister’s accumulation of beaurocratic power.
The Catalan rendering of Mr. Town Hall and Mr. Whitehall are neither flattering
nor derogatory, and few Catalans may be expected to be familiar with the
exact reference and connotation of The Daily Mirror. This causes bafflement
and frustration and leaves viewers struggling to find something funny and pa-
rodic, because at least they have enough clues elsewhere to know that that is
what they are supposed to be getting. Indeed, in situation comedy we are in
8 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
“contexts [that] are carefully contrived for maximum effect” and the jokes are
“clearly signalled” by canned laughter (Delabastita 1994:228).
What Nash writes about parodies seems to apply particularly well to trans-
lation. He reminds us that
The television productions Yes, Minister and The Black Adder make ample
use of pseudoparody. In translation, certain parodies of the source text might
have to be turned into pseudoparodies when comic effect is a more important
priority than enabling the audience to identify the parodied persons. For exam-
ple, the parodies in The Black Adder of specific figures of British history will
very likely be perceived by many foreign viewers as pseudoparodies or maybe even
stereotypes: for example, where George III is parodied in the original, in the Catalan
version the most that can be hoped for in the case of many viewers is that they
recognize him as a (typical?) eighteenth-century king of England.
The characters and events that appear in the series Yes, Minister have to do
with politics and government, and the type of humour that is displayed is fairly
subtle and light-hearted. So, if the translator, for whatever reason, cannot pro-
duce particularly skilful solutions for certain types of problems, there is a danger
that the dubbed version may be received by the audience as a more bitter,
humourless criticism of politicians, civil servants and their goings-on than may
have been the intention of the English version.
Walter Nash gives us more grounds on which to put into perspective the
importance of factual accuracy in rendering the referential items of television
comedy. According to him,
If such a text can be considered on its own terms, then it should be the case that
the same can be said of the translation of such a text, that is, insofar as it aims
at being a comedy in its own right. If we now take another look at our sample
text with this in mind, we may want to think of possible renderings into Catalan
for the verbal jokes I have highlighted. Backtranslated into English, “Mr Town
Hall as well as Mr Whitehall” might be rendered along the lines of “the coun-
try’s greatest beaurocrat”, where The Daily Mirror might become something
like “the leader of the opposition” to make it clear that the phrase was cer-
tainly not meant to flatter. “I’ve come here directly from Number Ten” could
be translated as “I’ve only had the job for ten hours” or something to that
effect, since this joke seems to depend on the repetition of the numbers 10 and
9.97, the Minister’s excuse being that he has not had enough time to think of a
policy to reduce beaurocracy.
Let us take as a starting point the hypothesis that there is, in principle, a com-
pletely open number of potential priorities and restrictions for the whole body
of existing and future translations and that priorities and restrictions have to
be identified anew for each task, which is not necessarily as time-consuming
as it may sound. For the purpose of evaluation and criticism, we may arrange
the set of priorities for a given translation on a vertical scale of importance,
ranging from a top priority all the way down to very minor priorities. The
reason for this is that part of our evaluation can be based on the consistency
with which solutions are found to satisfy higher-order priorities first and fore-
most, and lower-order priorities only in those cases when all of the more
important priorities have already been satisfied. Thus, a priority is also a re-
striction for all of the priorities that are below it.
Faced with the problem of rendering a joke or a play on words, the first
thing we need to know is the exact nature of the scale of priorities for the task
at hand, and more precisely, which priorities are above and which are below
humorous effect / laughter eliciting. The position (or presence) of any priority,
including this one, on the hierarchical scale may be different for the source text
and the translation, as I will attempt to show shortly. First, a few examples of
10 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
In the last case, it is actually the very absenceof humour that can count as a
priority. Let us consider the example of a politician giving basically the same
speech in different languages on a tour of several countries. The speech may
be of a serious nature in its basic intention, whether it be to win votes, to
spread ideology, to raise funds, to improve diplomatic relations or whatever.
However, the speech may include three or four jokes and puns. If the various
versions of the speech are produced by translating an original ‘master copy’,
each translator may want to bear in mind the following factors. Humour is not
a top priority on a global level (i.e. for the whole text), although it may be used
as an effective rhetorical device locally (i.e. in certain parts of the speech) for
the purpose of building a particular image for the speaker, illustrating a point,
providing an entertaining style, conforming to norms which require the pres-
ence of a few jokes in any public address, etc.
Humour, therefore, may be a global priority of marginal importance for the
text as a whole, and it will be dealt with in such a way as not to clash with
other priorities of a higher order. It may even make sense not to translate the
jokes at all, for example if the norms of the target audience exclude using
humour for the same rhetorical purposes in similar conditions. However, if it
is decided that it is desirable and therefore a priority for the target text to
accommodate jokes, the original jokes will have to be rendered as jokes that
actually work as such, which means that entirely different jokes may have to
be substituted for the original ones. In this case we could say that humour in
the text is locally a priority of a very high order. This ‘local’ reshuffling of the
global priorities should be regarded as a more roundabout means of achieving
the same goals for the text as a whole.
A more subtle analysis than the basic typology just provided will often be
called for. Thus, one must consider the possible functions of humour (escapist
entertainment, social criticism, pedagogical device, moralizing intention), as
well as the possible mental states and attitudes expressed by it. The latter
remark refers to those aspects of humour that can be given labels such as bit-
ter, cynical, provocative, ironic, hearty, or that manifest the speaker’s social
views and behaviur, as in racist or sexist jokes. Typically, a broad distinction
is often made between so-called harmless jokes and those which may cause
offence. In the case of Yes, Minister, the possible functions of humour in its
Patrick Zabalbeascoa 11
We have just seen two kinds of labels which can be tagged onto each indi-
vidual priority, or put differently, two scales on which to place each priority,
namely the vertical scale of importance and the local/global scale to indicate
which parts of a text are affected by certain priorities. The concept of equiva-
lence can be seen as a third means of describing priorities. Thus, each priority
can have one of the following properties: ‘equivalence’ (i.e. it is a priority for
the translation to be equivalent to the original in a certain respect and to a
certain extent), ‘non-equivalence’ (i.e. it is a priority for the translation not to
show a certain kind or degree of equivalence), or ‘equivalence not regarded’.
In the last case, the priority solely concerns the acceptability of the target text
and therefore has no direct bearing on the equivalent or non-equivalent render-
ing of source-text features; it will in fact, orrule any lower priorities that do
concern the transfer operation per se and may in this way, depending on the
actual circumstances, result in equivalence or non-equivalence as a kind of by-
product. As I have suggested, in the three cases equivalence is a variable not
only in terms of degree, ranging as it may from ‘absolute identity’ to ‘slight
resemblance’, but also in terms of the various textual and functional levels that
may be distinguished in the analysis and the priorities to which the conept of
equivalence may be assigned.
Translating comedy in order to produce comedy entails that intended comic
effect is a priority that is both very high on the scale of importance and a
global one, i.e. relevant to the text as a whole. It is moreoever an equivalence
priority, requiring near-absolute identity. The insistence on the word ‘intended’
means that equivalence is here seen as a characteristic of an intention to be
funny, regardless of the final outcome. What matters in this case is the percep-
tion of the source text’s humour as a basis for the decision to make the
translation a humorous text. The translation can then be judged according to
exactly how funny it is in its own right. From this perspective, there is little point
in comparing source and target texts in terms of the exact amount and type of
humour they contain; if anything, it would be desirable for the translation to be
even funnier than the source text.
Of course, this is not to say that comedy would have to be translated as
comedy at all times. If a translator or perhaps his/her client wished to elimi-
nate this aspect from the translation, for whatever reason, we might say that
‘avoiding comic effect’ is a non-equivalence priority for the translation of a
humorous source text. This particular possibility does not seem very likely for
14 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
It would appear that translators are often afraid of moving away from
the text and replacing an untranslatable joke with another one which
would work in the target language, even if it is completely different
from the original.
native-speaker informants and experts in script writing. Long series that are
translated by more than one person also require that each translator be aware
of what the others are doing. On a different level, the quality of dubbed ver-
sions may be improved if translators are allowed to be present and to provide
their expert opinion in all stages of the dubbing process. This is important
insofar as solutions need to integrate the verbal and nonverbal elements (e.g.
intonation, voice quality, sighs, hesitations, special effects), making the per-
formance a vital element to the success of dubbings. This requires good acting
and directing as well as adequate technical support. Much depends also on the
casting. Economic, professional, and labour constraints are often such that too
small a number of voices have to do too many parts in a variety of productions,
leading to predictability, saturation and disruption of dramatic illusion, and
certainly accounting for part of the public’s negative reactions.
Finally, translators would have to be aided by adequate materials, which
might include general and specialized reference books, computerized databases,
single-purpose word-processors and other electronic translation tools. An es-
sential part of the translator’s reference material should be a specialized in-house
stylebook, which could include all the information that the employer or firm
can anticipate that the translator will need to know and use, including glossa-
ries, television policies and translational norms, spelling out the priorities and
restrictions for each type of case, along with a considerable number of practi-
cal examples of problems and strategies.
ST: A Minister with two ideas. I can’t remember when we last had
one of those.
TT: Un Ministre amb dues idees. No recordo qui va ser l’últim que
vam tenir.
(Gloss: A Minister with two ideas. I can’t remember the last one we
had.)
18 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
ST: It wasn’t me who put it that way, it was The Daily Mirror.
TT: No sóc pas jo qui ho diu això, és el Daily Mirror.
(Gloss: I am not the one who says that, it is The Daily Mirror.)
Later in the same exchange the Minister explains that he has just come from
seeing the Prime Minister; he uses the common expression Number Ten for
the Prime Minister’s official residence. This gives the interviewer Ludovic
Kennedy the chance for a retort (“From number 9.97 perhaps”) to pay the
Minister back for just having corrected his figure of a 10% increase in Depart-
mental staff (“the figure was much more like 9.97%”). The Catalan version is
a translation of the meaning of the words, but few Catalan viewers can be
expected to be quick enough to identify “el número deu” (number ten) with the
Prime Minister, and many would probably never make the association without
being told. The audience would probably have appreciated a less literal but
more entertaining version. A solution that would account for the priorities of
comprehensibility, laughter-eliciting and conversational coherence could be
the following:
JH: És massa aviat per anunciar propostes detallades. Tot just fa deu hores
que m’han donat aquesta responsabilitat.
LK: O potser només 9,97?
(Gloss: JH: It is too early to announce detailed proposals. I was only given
the job ten hours ago.
LK: Or just 9.97, perhaps?)
no ‘objective’ justification, it might still be useful from the point of view of the
audience’s (or the translator’s) perception of such things as a national or col-
lective sense of humour. Most Catalans tend to have a high, positive opinion of
themselves, collectively, as a nation, especially within the context of the Ibe-
rian Peninsula. It is difficult to find examples of how this can affect the
translation of a series like Yes, Minister, but we have seen a clear example in
the dubbing of the series Fawlty Towers. In the original, the character Manuel,
from Barcelona, is a silly clown who is incapable of stringing two correct
words of English to save his life; he is constantly being excused for his strange
behaviour with the pseudo-logical explanation that “well, he is from Barce-
lona”. Significantly, Manuel’s birthplace is moved to Mexico in the Catalan
translation.
Language-dependent jokes depend on features of natural language for
their effect, such as polysemy (a word or phrase has more than one meaning,
e.g. fox meaning both an animal and a sly person), homophony (different words or
phrases sound alike, e.g. hair and hare), zeugma (one word is made to
refer to two or more other words, but has to be differentlly understood in the
different contexts, e.g. went in she went to the States and bankrupt). From the
referential or cultural perspective such jokes might otherwise be fairly ‘inter-
national’, and it must be said that they may on occasion be translated more or
less literally when the two languages are very closely related. However, very
often radical substitutions or other major shifts are required, depending of course
on the priorities for the task at hand. The series Yes, Minister does not play
very heavily on this sort of humour, but here is one example; the Minister is
talking about why people go into politics:
ST:...the other half are in it for what they can get out of it.
TT: i els altres només procuren omplir-se les butxaques.
(Gloss: ... and the others are just trying to line their pockets.)
The meaning of the sentence is accurately rendered in the Catalan version, but
the humorous effect is lost. The original playfully contrasts the idomatic ex-
pressions be in [politics] and get [things, profit] out of [a political career] on
the basis of the opposition in/out and supports the joke by the proper timing
and intonation in its delivery. In Catalan the sentence sounds more like a blunt,
humourless criticism.
Under visual jokes we could discriminate between humour derived solely
from what one sees on the screen and the kind of joke that may seem entirely
visual but is really the visually coded version of a linguistic joke, as in a rebus
(i.e. a newspaper-style hieroglyphic puzzle). The second type is therefore
language-dependent; an example would be the image of a button, not
representing the word button but meaning ‘be quiet’ from the idiom button
(up) your lip. When jokes depend on an interplay of verbal and non-verbal
20 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
ST: They call him ‘Pilgrim’, because every time he takes her out he
makes a little progress.
TT: Li diuen ‘Tirantlo’ perquè quan es lliga una noia sempre dóna
en el Blanc.
(Gloss: They call him ‘Tirantlo’ beacause whenever he chats up a girl
he always makes his mark.)
The English joke alludes to John Buynan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, a famous
late-seventeenth-century Christian allegory full of profound religious sentiment,
in the rather more wordly context of gossip and amorous conquest. My
translation calls to mind Tirant lo Blanch, a fifteenth-century story about the
adventures of a medieval knight; literally, this title means ‘Tirant the White
(Knight)’, but the Catalan joke plays on the similarity of Blanch (‘white’) and
blanc (‘bull’s eye’). Even though this translation substitutes a new allusion
and a new pun for the Englsih ones, it explicitly seeks to retain some of the
features of the original. Thus, the equivalence priorities for this particular
translation were: first, producing comic effect by means of a one-liner; second,
playing linguistically on the title of a famous work of literature that is several
centuries old; third, telling a short story about a man’s nickname coming from
his relationship with the women he takes out; finally, placing the punch-word
at the end of the joke. There was a non-equivalence priority, too: the famous
work of literature must belong to the Catalan, not the English literary tradition.
I can imagine that this kind of approach will often prove successful in translating
comedy for television, but that is of course not to say that as a translation
procedure it automatically applies to all types of texts and translation
assignments. Indeed, as I have already suggested, more research is needed to
establish the correlations between translation problems, their various possible
Patrick Zabalbeascoa 21
solutions, and their likely effect and success in the many possible configurations
of factors in which they might have to function.
7. Concluding remarks
Success in translating jokes for television comedy is not only a matter of lang-
uage and language differences, although these are very important and must
be explored more fully. Translating humour or any other kind of programme
for television is also a profession, and its results can surely be improved by
introducing better working conditions and a more professional attitude. This is
an area of translation that is directly relevant to enormous audiences and there-
fore deserves more attention both from television networks and scholars.
Specialized stylesheets may be a very helpful means of facilitating and
professionalizing the translation of television programmes. The Catalan net-
work has produced numerous stylesheets for their translators, but almost all of
the information they provide are guidelines regarding the correct usage of lan-
guage. I submit that this type of stylesheet would benefit greatly from taking
into account the numerous insights of books such as Walter Nash’s The Lan-
guage of Humour.
Finally, it is also important to bear in mind that just as there are many
different strategies within the process of translation, translation itself is just
another strategy that is open to anyone wishing to adapt a foreign programme
to a different audience. Thus, the dubbed version of the Humor Amarillo pro-
gramme referred to in section 3.2. above did not resort to translation in the
strict sense of that term. In fact, in the case of two other popular British com-
edy programmes, the Mr Bean series and the Benny Hill show, translation is
hardly necessary, as both rely heavily on mime and visual gags and are actu-
ally reminiscent of silent-film productions. However, in one memorable sketch
from Mr Bean, although no actual words are uttered, there is a series of
mumblings that are distinctly recognizable to the English audience as being
parodic of a church sermon, purely on the basis of rhythm and intonation. These
mumbling sounds were not ‘translated’ or changed in any other way for the
Catalan audience and were consequently no longer readily recognizable the
way they were for their home audience.
Sometimes a translator will be incapable of finding a rendering that can be
called funny. Chiaro (1992:85) points to one of the problems this may lead to:
If it were not for the canned laughter many jokes and humorous quips
occurring in foreign versions of imported American comedies could
easily pass by unnoticed. Despite signals which indicate that some-
one has just said something funny, it is not always the case that the
audience is going to be amused by the translated quip.
If something is not funny, the canned laughter alone is not usually going to
22 Translating Jokes for Dubbed Comedies
make it funny: rather it will make the viewer feel that something is seriously
wrong with the programme, either in its original version or in the translation.
One possible strategy would be to admit defeat and cut out the background
laughter, a solution seldom resorted to, but a perfect illustration the impor-
tance of fully integrating the translation of the script into with the whole dubbing
process.
PATRICK ZABALBEASCOA
Facultat de Traducció i Interpretació, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, La Rambla
30-32, 08002 Barcelona, Spain. patrick.zabalbeascoa@trad.upf.es
Note
References
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