Translating humorous puns in Almodóvar’s films. A cognitive-pragmatic approach

Abstract

The use of language in dialogues is a paramount element in Almodóvar’s films, as highlighted more than once. The main purpose of the present chapter, in this sense, is to give a cognitive-pragmatic account of the translation solutions used by translators to render language-specific jokes in the English subtitles of Almodóvar’s films. More specifically, the translation of humorous puns is analysed from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Regarding the translation of puns in the corpus of this study, more often than not those cognitive effects associated with the processing of wordplay are also accessible to the target audience. Thus, in 66.3% of the cases the pragmatic scenario has been preserved, even if the semantic scenario had to be changed to a greater or lesser extent. In this way, the inferential strategies which made the derivation of humorous effects in the SL possible were preserved in the TT. The type of pun variable has been analysed and has been found to affect the choice of translation solution. In this sense, a polysemic pun is much more likely to be maintained in the TT if translated literally than a phonologic pun. Therefore, whereas punning correspondence is the most frequent solution for phonologic puns, in the case of idomatic puns the most common solution was change of pun, which also was, together with direct copy, the preferred one for puns rooted in phonology.