A Process-based Study of the Reformulation Strategies of Culture-bound Humorous Discourse

This paper illustrates the results of a case study carried out at the University of Salento, where a number of undergraduate students were asked to produce an Italian translation for the subtitles of a humorous segment from Late Show with David Letterman characterised by derogatory references to American celebrities and pop culture. First, a multidisciplinary theoretical framework will be illustrated, presenting audiovisual translation as a cognitive, socio-cultural and multimodal process. Then, the English and Italian versions of the selected corpus of extracts will be compared, so as to enquire into the extent to which the source-script reformulations stem from the integration of the text-based and knowledge-based inferencing of the denotative-semantic and connotative-pragmatic dimensions, as well as from the features of the implied receivers’ schemata, which determine the students’ selection of specific linguistic and functional features. The analysis will discuss whether the adaptations of the references in the source text succeed in pursuing a compromise between the respect for the original illocutionary force and the activation of appropriate perlocutionary effects. Finally, by resorting to the Think Aloud Protocol, this paper will also explore the cognitive processes activated by the subjects to retextualise the original discourse into target-language pragmalinguistic equivalents.