Tradurre racconti umoristici: The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories

This dissertation focuses on the translation of four humorous short stories from the collection The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories by the American author Simon Rich. Translating humorous texts presupposes some basic notions regarding Humor Studies and their application to the field of translation. The first chapter introduces this particular area of studies and it is aimed at clarifying the theoretical premises and the terminology on which the text analysis and the approach to translation discussed in the following chapters will be based. In Chapter 2 the young American author and his works – mostly unknown in Italy – are introduced. Chapter 3 centers on a comparison between the traditional Italian "racconto umoristico" and the American humorous short story: first of all, the distribution of such textual genre in these two publishing markets is compared. The stylistic differences between the humorous short stories of the Italian tradition and those of the American tradition are also discussed. Following the conclusions drawn from the previous chapters, Chapter 4 deals in more detail with The Last Girlfriend on Earth and Other Love Stories. The structure of the collection is analyzed, and its main themes are discussed and compared with those of Rich's previous works. The translations of the selected short stories are presented in Chapter 5, and the most relevant aspects and difficulties that emerged during the translation process are discussed in Chapter 6. The commentary focuses mainly on the translation of the comic and culture-specific elements. The strategies with which the most problematic syntactic and semantic aspects of the source texts have been translated are presented with a particular emphasis on the importance of the recreation of the pragmatic function of the source text.