Such fun ! The subtitling of humour in the TV show Miranda

Subtitles are a well-known technique to understand foreign movies. Translating humour in an audio visual document is, however, a challenge for any translator. Indeed, this latter must distinguish this culture different from the target culture. It is necessary to adapt humour to induce laughter from the viewers. In this paper, the characteristics of humour are explained. Jokes rest upon the principle of incongruity, i.e. a plot twist, or the notion of “butt of the joke”. Nonetheless, subtitling implies two key elements: the text and the image. First, the subtitler has to understand the jokes to adapt it as a text for a target culture. This adaptation must not provoke a shock between text and image, which would ruin the translation. Humour in subtitling is based on word plays, image, shared knowledge with the viewers, metalinguistic elements, or several of these concepts combined. Those theories and differences are explored in the subtitling of the first three episodes of Miranda, followed by commentaries about various issues during the translation, in order to understand better the subtitling of humour.