WHAT ARE THE DIFFICULTIES OF TRANSLATING HUMOUR FROM ENGLISH INTO SPANISH USING THE SUBTITLED BRITISH COMEDY SKETCH SHOW LITTLE BRITAIN AS A CASE STUDY?

Charles Harrison

BA (Honours) Applied Languages
University of Portsmouth
School of Languages and Area Studies
Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences March 2012
Table of Contents

Abstract…………………………………………………………………...1

Introduction………………………………………………………………2

Chapter 1: Humour and Subtitling……………………………………...4

1.1 What is Humour?................................................................................4

1.2 Overview of Theories of Humour……………………………………4
1.2.1 Humour of Little Britain ………………………………………5
1.2.1.1 The Schema
The show, in general, deals with the social, political and economical situations in Great Britain. These situations are seen under the scope of extreme humour and in order to achieve humour, parody is employed which creates familiarity for the viewers.
The study aims to focus on the translation of the British comedy-sketch show known as Little Britain and find out how it has been translated from the SL (source language) which is English, to the TL which in this case will be Spanish.
Chapter 1 introduces some background information in relation to the topic of humour and the humour of Little Britain will be discussed in order to understand how it is produced. Although humour is not easily generalised, chapter 1 includes an overview about the Spanish sense of humour which becomes relevant in the final chapter. This dissertation does not attempt to discuss the subtitling or the subtitling, however there are certain subtitling limitations that need to be mentioned as the case study is a subtitled TV programme thus difficulties of translating humour extend beyond lexical and grammatical issues.
Chapter 2 explores the translation of humour, examining potential problems that translators need to overcome. It expands on this by investigating the difficulties that arise when translating culture-specific issues. In addition, as this is an audiovisual translation, potential problems will be