The Invisible Comedian. The translation of humor in the contemporary film industry.

CRISTIAN PALACIOS

Berna

Workshop; Language Work in the Movies.; 2023

Departamento de Lenguaje y comunicación de la Universidad de Berna

It is a well-known fact, although relatively little explored, that, in the universe of discourses attributable to a certain discursive community in a certain period of time, there are a group of texts linked to the professional and/or institutionalized practice of laughter that in our previous works we have called Ridiculous Discourses (Palacios 2014, 2018, 2019); within the framework of which it is possible to think the production of comic and humorous discourses as a social field in its own right (Possenti 2010: 171). This field has a rich and complex history that includes the comedians and cartoonists of the modern age as well as the parasites depicted in the Attic Comedy. On the other hand, it excludes what Ana Flores calls “non-aesthetic humor” (Flores 2014: 143), that is, the derisory manifestations that occur in everyday life or in other serious professional fields: the occasional joke of the dentist, the irony of the journalist, the sarcasm of the politician. It excludes, also, a kind of humoristic production that goes practically unnoticed in front of our eyes, despite the fact that it is present in a large part of the consumption of the contemporary film humor, that is, the work of translators, subtitlers and dubbing actors that make the series, movies, sit-coms, and stand-up specials that we usually consume on streaming platforms, legal or illegal, available to the general public. They not only have to find the equivalences between linguistic terms from one language to another, but also recreate a joke, a pun or a wordplay impossible to translate into the target language. The traditional bibliography (Chiaro 2012, Zabalbescoa 2001) insists on the fact that humor is cultural and socially determined, so that what makes laugh some communities and nations in different times, do not make others laugh; that jokes and linguistic turns are basically untranslatable from one language to another, from one social context to another one. And yet the opposite is no less true. The globalization of the film industry and the boom of the streaming platforms throw onto our screens, day after day, a lot of wordplays, funny references and jokes translated, dubbed and subtitled into different languages from the original.