VERBAL HUMOUR TRANSLATION PROCEDURES IN MODERN AMERICAN COMEDIES

Abstract

This article focuses on the humour translation in modern American comedies. The purposes of this research were to study the challenges of comedy genre translation and to analyse verbal humour translation from English into Russian. The results reveal the 5 humour types appearing in the film: sarcasm humour followed by pun humour, and wit, irony and satire occurred respectively at the same frequency. In addition, the study found the 6 translation techniques used for dealing with humorous expressions in these comedies: concretization, generalisation, lexical omission, holistic transformation, antonymic translation and using neutral or less expressive words. It can be concluded that the most important factor to consider when translating humour is retaining as much as possible of the original humour type.