Chapter 10

Subtitling of British stand-up comedy into Italian

As Chiaro (1992: 5) points out, ‘[t]he concept of what people find funny appears to be surrounded by linguistic, geographical, diachronic, socio-cultural and personal boundaries’. Nevertheless, empirical research on the perception of subtitled humour is still limited, even though scholarly interest in the rendering of humour within Audiovisual Translation Studies has increased considerably over the past decade (Veiga 2009: 3). Moreover, most of the existing literature on the audience of translated audiovisual products mainly relies on the use of survey tools such as questionnaires (see Bairstow 2011 and Di Giovanni 2012) or group discussions (see Tuominen 2011), thus recording and observing people’s reactions based on their subjective opinion. Even publications presenting research projects that use more experimental methods such as eye tracking tend to focus on the translator’s activity rather than on the recipients of its products (see Muñoz Martín 2010 and Lachaud 2011). Furthermore, no works examining the subtitling of British stand-up comedy humour into Italian have been produced, implying that there is no literature on this topic from the audience’s perceptive. In order to bridge the research gaps highlighted above, this work studies the perception and reception of a clip taken from British comedian Eddie Izzard’s show Dress to Kill (1998) by a sample of 103 Italians, adopting a two-step methodology combining an online survey questionnaire and eye tracking. In the specific case of Eddie Izzard, the sense of humour originates from culture-bound and metalinguistic elements, references to sensitive subjects such as history and religion (Glick 2007), as well as surrealism (Friedman 2011: 38; Johnston 2014), which may be challenging for an Italian audience as normally these features are not found in Italian stand-up comedy and humour.