DO “HA-HA-HA” AO “[RISOS]”: UM ESTUDO DESCRITIVO DA TRADUÇÃO DO HUMOR EM MODERN FAMILY

Abstract

This research is situated within the disciplinary field of Translation Studies, specifically focusing on pure, descriptive, product-oriented studies. The main objective is to describe the linguistic/textual strategies responsible for constituting humor in both the source text and the subtitled version of the American sitcom Modern Family. The specific objectives are: (i) to identify instances of humor in the source text; (ii) to describe the verbal resources employed in constructing humor in the source text; (iii) to map the translation units present in the humorous segments; and (iv) to identify the translation strategies applied to the translation of verbal humor. The data was collected directly from the streaming platform through linguistic transcription, forming a parallel, bilingual, and unidirectional corpus composed of the source text in English and the subtitles in Brazilian Portuguese. The data analysis was based on a descriptive methodology (Triviños, 1987) and parameters from Corpus Linguistics (Berber-Sardinha, 2000). The object of study was recorded and analyzed without interference or manipulation. The quantitative analysis was conducted with the support of the AntConc program (Anthony, 2024), aiming to identify and subsequently compare the numbers in each subcorpus and the corpus as a whole. The qualitative analysis sought to investigate and categorize the Phraseological Units present in the corpus (Corpas Pastor, 1996; Alvarez, 2014a; 2014b; Baptista, 2014; Bragança Junior, 2014; Ferreira, 2009; Fonseca; Parreira, 2014; Frosi, 2014; Monteiro-Plantin, 2014; Riva, 2014; Pinheiro, 2015; Barreiros; Telles, 2017; Ramos-Nogueira, 2017; Oliveira, 2018; Alencar, 2021; Oliveira, 2022; Zossou; Rodrigues, 2022), identifying the instances of humor (Nash, 1985; Zabalbeascoa, 1996; Pedersen, 2011; Ranzato, 2016; Martínez Sierra; Zabalbeascoa Terran, 2017; Díaz-Cintas; Remael, 2021), as well as discussing issues related to what can (or cannot) be considered humorous (Campos, 2013; Harari, 2014; Adichie, 2014; Gay, 2014; Bergson, 2018), in addition to questions related to translation (e.g., Technical Translation Procedures). The quantitative results revealed, as expected, that the subtitles contained lowest characters compared to the source text. Moreover, it was observed that the source text featured a higher frequency of subjects than the subtitles, a phenomenon initially attributed to differences between linguistic systems. Meanwhile, the qualitative results listed and described the Phraseological Units present in the source text and the Translation Units in the target text (subtitles). Through the analyzed corpus, it was also possible to understand that when translating multimodal materials (Gonzales, 2018a; 2018b), particularly those with humorous content, translators must consider not only linguistic/textual aspects but also auditory and visual elements. Thus, the study identified the presence of pejorative and/or prejudiced terms, which challenge the concept of humor. It was possible to understand that in the translation of Phraseological Units the translators attempted to preserve meaning even when the elements that characterize them as phraseologisms (e.g., metaphors) were not maintained. Furthermore, it was detected that some of the jokes in the source text (as well as their respective translations) reinforce homophobic and prejudiced stereotypes about non-native English speakers.