A Study of the Translation of Humour in the Sitcom "How I Met Your Mother"

Abstract

The main objective of this piece of research is to analyse the translation’s impact on TV shows once they are translated into a target language. In many cases, the essence of humour is lost in the translation process, due to different factors like cultural background, linguistic or phonetic elements. Thus, this work studies how some characteristics from Spanish may impede an accurate translation of the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother”. More specifically, the paper aims to examine whether the message, the essence, the humour and in many cases the topic of the original script is modified when translated into Spanish. Chiaro (2010) describes some of the difficulties translators face in dealing with translation process. In this line, this project also considers the difficulties faced in the translation of humour in the sitcom mentioned above. The method employed to carry out this study was watching the entire show first in English and afterwards in Spanish to examine how the script has been modified. Once translated, some expressions from the original script were found to become non-sense and out of context. In this concern, the project identifies and discusses over some of the main reasons of this problem, for example: a wrong choice of the translation method, a lack of vocabulary from the target language or an impossible resemblance or adaptation of a joke based on the pronunciation of the source language. Furthermore, adapting accurately the English expressions into Spanish may avoid the loss of the humour in translation. The last section of this paper discusses why the translation mostly fails, what should translators do and which seems to be the best translation techniques; some limitations of the study and some evidences of an accurate translation.