“Does it make you laugh?” Il doppiaggio della comicità nella serie televisiva Modern Family

The purpose of this work is to investigate the multimedia translation, also referred to as au-diovisual translation, which is a specialized branch of translation, with particular attention to the perception of humor in the Italian version of an audiovisual product. The American TV series “Modern Family” will be used as a concrete example to show how hard it is to render jokes and puns in a language different from the one they were conceived in. The analysis aims at studying the strategies employed by Italian translators in order to mimic the original effects the authors wanted to create while writing the script of the show. The present work is structured as follows: the first chapter provides an overview of the au-diovisual translation, starting with a general definition, going through the historical back-ground and the strategies deployed, and presenting the different forms of language transfer. The second chapter focuses on the process of dubbing, its history and how it influences dif-ferent countries, including Italy. The third and the fourth chapters are the corpus of this study. They offer an in-depth analy-sis of the phenomenon of humour and the cultural aspects both the translator and the viewer have to know in order to understand and grasp the comic nuances concealed in the show. Hence, this study tries to show the strategies a translator has to follow in order to keep the desired effects of an original audiovisual product.