Proposta di sottotitolazione di The Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen

The aim of this dissertation is to analyse the main translating issues related to the subtitling into Italian of the U.S. comedy show The Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen, which premiered on September 19, 2011. The show is very well known in the United States for being controversial and for stretching the boundaries of what can be considered acceptable in comedy by using a large amount of taboo humour and taboo language to elicit laughter from the audience. The present work consists of four chapters. Chapter one offers a general overview of audiovisual translation (AVT), a relatively new and yet quite unexplored branch of Translation Studies. After outlining the main features of the audiovisual text, the chapter focuses on the subtitling practice providing a short history and examining its main features: the spatial and temporal constraints, the ensuing need for dialogue condensations and the switch from the oral to the written mode. The second chapter opens with a brief theoretical framework on the translation of humour, analysing how this field has evolved. Special attention will be devoted to the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Raskin and Attardo, 1991). Being rooted in a specific cultural and linguistic context, humour can pose significant issues in translation. This chapter also deals with the main challenges of subtitling of humour and provides an outline of audience perception. The third chapter starts with an overview of stand-up comedy as a genre and a brief history of the roast from its origins to the present days. After an outline of its main features, the chapter describes The Comedy Central Roast of Charlie Sheen both in form and content, emphasising the importance that both humour and pop culture have within this kind of comedy show. The fourth and final chapter deals with the core study of this dissertation. After a detailed step-by-step presentation of the methodology used in the creation of the subtitling project, the chapter focuses on the practical analysis of the strategies used to solve the main problems found in the translation process. One section is specifically dedicated to humour based on cultural references and its translation; a second section is devoted to the translation of humour based on wordplay; a third section examines the translation of taboo language and taboo subjects and another section is dedicated to the translation of rhyme, defective pronunciation and idioms.