La comicità ad alta velocità Analisi di un'interpretazione simultanea dal francese all'italiano

This work focuses on the reproduction of humor in simultaneous interpreting, i.e., a mode of interpreting in which the speaker produces a speech and the interpreter reformulates it at the same time into a language that his/her audience understands. The data discussed was collected through an experiment carried out by the author, presenting two videos of the same speaker talking in the setting of Assemblée Nationale, in France. These two videos were interpreted from French into Italian by eleven students of the post-graduate Master’s Degree in Interpreting (University of Bologna). Their interpretation was provided and recorded online, on the Zoom platform, then transcribed and analyzed with a special focus on seven types of verbally expressed humor, namely: self-denigrating humor, teasing, sarcasm, irony, puns, exaggeration, putdowns, and anecdotes. Li’s (2013) classification of strategies implemented during simultaneous interpreting was used to discuss some excerpts from the interpreters’ renditions. The main findings of the qualitative analyses of interpreters’ renditions, although based on a small set of data, unraveled three main trends 1) humor becomes overall more explicit; 2) interpreters tend to omit details, as they do when interpreting speeches without humor, but this hinders the climax upon which humor is based; 3) when interpreters follow the speaker’s flow, reproducing his/her tone of voice and prosody, humor travels best. Since humor is everywhere, including in political speeches given in ‘serious’ contexts, it would be beneficial to raise awareness of its functions among young interpreters, highlighting the best strategies to use when faced with it in simultaneous interpreting.