Subtitling stand-up comedy discourse: text function and narrative in translation

The mass-translation of audiovisual texts on streaming services and catalogues has increased the consumption of audiovisual material in the past decade, as well as the range of genres that are subtitled, dubbed and audio-described, and made instantly available in a plethora of different languages. In the field of AVT, humour has been addressed with relevance and consistence from the point of view of the most consumed humorous audiovisual product - situational comedy (or sitcom). Stand-up comedy, in spite of its self-identification as a live performance centred on a humorous monologue, has been an influencing force on the humour of sit-coms, and has been translated and streamed alongside more popular and traditional audiovisual texts. This study addresses the strategies employed in translated sit-coms and stand-up comedy performances on the streaming platform Netflix, from a functionalist perspective. By providing an account of the structural features of stand-up comedy monologues, in comparison to relevant studies on TV fictional dialogue and its discourse components, this study rediscusses the function of the two texts based on the inversed roles of narrative and humour in stand-up comedy compared to sit- com. In turn, this original concept here proposed is expanded with regards to translation theory and translation practices and corroborated with translation analyses on relevant case studies.