Verbale humor in Nederlandse en Duitse ondertiteling: Een casestudy van RuPaul’s Drag Race
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51751/dujal22894Keywords:
verbal humor, subtitling, translation strategies, audiovisual translation, RuPaul's Drag RaceAbstract
This article reports on an investigation of Dutch and German subtitles of the American reality show RuPaul’s Drag Race. The analysis
mainly focuses on whether the verbal humor is preserved in the translated subtitles. Furthermore, co-occurrence patterns between types of verbal humor, translation strategies, and differences between Dutch and German subtitles have been analyzed. The analysis covers 113 instances of verbal humor and their subtitles across three selected episodes. The results reveal that verbal humor is lost in more than half of the cases. Specific translation patterns emerged, such as the neutralization of paronyms
and literal translation of polysemes. Additionally, in the Dutch subtitles, more expressions from the source text (borrowing) were retained than in the German ones. This study not only confirms that verbal humor often gets lost in subtitles, but also highlights the specific challenges subtitlers face depending on the type of verbal humor in the source text.
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