Italians' Perception and Reception of British Stand-Up Comedy Humour with Interlingual Subtitles (PDF)

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation from the year 2016 in the subject Interpreting / Translating , grade: Pass, University College London (Centre for Translation Studies), course: PhD in Translation Studies, language: English, abstract: If we look at the existing publications addressing topics related to the audiovisual translation mode of subtitling and the rendering of humour into another language, we shall notice that there has been an undeniable growth within these branches of translation studies. Nonetheless, this statement does not apply to the specific field of translation of stand-up comedy humour by means of interlingual subtitles. The literature related to this research field reveals a significant gap especially when the focus is on how audiences respond to this type of translated audiovisual products, and when the source language and the target language are respectively British English and Italian.

The present PhD project was designed to fill the aforementioned research gap and, in order to attain this purpose, some sketches selected from three of Eddie Izzard's stand-up comedy shows (Dress to Kill, Circle and Stripped, for which Italian subtitles are available in the official DVDs) were played to a sample of 103 Italians based in Italy so as to observe their reaction.

In order to study the specific research field outlined above, the project was made even more original and innovative by adopting a twofold methodology that combines the use of a survey questionnaire with the eye-tracking technology for the data collection.

The ultimate aims of this research project were to discover: 1) whether the import of audiovisual products involving British stand-up comedy humour with interlingual subtitles can be deemed as successful in a dubbing country like Italy; 2) the role played by factors such as age, level of English and habit of watching video material in English in the Italian participants' degree of appreciation of this type of product, as well as in their attention distribution between subtitles and images; and 3) whether a triangulated methodological approach can help to obtain more reliable findings.