Multilingual Humour in Audiovisual Translation

This chapter concentrates on how multilingual humour is created and trans- ferred across languages and cultures. To this end, I will focus in particular on the TV comedy series Modern Family (Christopher Lloyd and Steven Levitan, 2009–) and its Italian dubbed, subtitled and fansubbed versions. This series revolves around the lives of Jay Pritchett and his family in suburban Los Angeles. Linguistically speaking, the most inter- esting character is Jay’s second wife Gloria Delgado, a beautiful young Colombian woman who often code-switches and code-mixes English and Spanish (with a marked Colombian accent) to express her bicultural identity (Monti 2016: 69). The scriptwriters exploit in- terlingual misunderstandings, mistranslations and mispronunciation for comic effect by introducing an incongruity or conflict between different cognitive schemes (Delabastita and Grutman 2005: 18–24). These elements create moments of sheer comedy and con- tribute to the show’s long-lasting success, but they are also challenging from a translator’s point of view. The analysis demonstrates the current tendency of Italian dubbing to render otherness in translation (Monti 2016: 89). Similarly, both captioned target texts include deviation from standard language (De Bonis 2015; Magazzù 2019). This is certainly a more innovative transfer of vehicular matching (O’Sullivan 2007), which is however likely to depend on the genre of the source text and its perlocutionary function (Hickey 1998; cf. also Zabalbeascoa 2012: 322).