Delia Chiaro

• Professor at University of Bologna

This chapter provides an overview of the role translation plays when acting as a humorous device within the original versions of multilingual films. This humour often emerges from linguistic misunderstandings, whether accidental or intentional or else from bilingual characters, serving as linguistic intermediaries, who contribute to the comedic dyn...

For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential sc...

The vulnerability of sex workers in the porn industry is a heated debate within feminism. The UK 2014 Audiovisual Media Services Regulations and 2017 Digital Economy Act, which burden the production of online pornography, provoked sex workers’ Face-Sitting and Kink Olympixxx protests. This paper investigates how throughout these protests, humour co...

This paper examines occurrences of humour in Twitter-fed celebrity-follower communities. Using a small, one-month sample of the Twitter feeds of 12 British celebrities, we examined political and humorous content of celebrity tweets and the first five responses from their followers. From this preliminary study, we found that the notion of “weirdisat...

Despite the fact that both state owned (RAI) and privately owned (Mediaset) Ital-ian television channels habitually adopt scantily dressed women in provocative poses to fulfill a purely decorative function on daytime television, a closer look at Italian TV reveals that it is far less liberated than it seems. In fact, in stark con-tradiction to the...

Audiovisual translation (AVT) refers to the transfer from one language to another of the verbal components contained in audiovisual works and products. Because audiovisual materials are meant to be seen and heard simultaneously, their translation is different from translating print. Written works are primarily meant to be read whereas audiovisual w...

All humans eat and all humans speak – activities which in social life often, but not always, co-occur: We talk while eating and drinking with others, but food is also a prominent literal and metaphorical discursive topic which contributes to establishing communities and identities. This omnipresence of eating and drinking in our daily lives has led...

Despite a long tradition of scholarship and the vast amount of dubbed audiovisual products available on the global market, dubbing is still relatively underrepresented in audiovisual research. The aim of this volume is to give dubbing research its due by showing that, far from being a doomed or somewhat declining form of AVT, it is being exploited...

This paper examines the work of Billy Wilder whose rich cinematic production frequently involves the collision of different languages as well as the clash of dissimilar cultures. As an Austrian living in the USA, the director had the privilege of gaining insight into his adopted culture from the point of view of an outsider – a bilingual ‘other’ wh...

The law and lawyers are so pervasive in US life and culture that it should come as no surprise that they invite the kind of parody that the cinematic tradition has displayed from the birth of the movies to the present day. By examining a small number of well-known courtroom comedies, this short essay will examine how these movies often use an unlik...

This essay provides a brief overview of English jokes targeting Italians, and sets out to show how internet memes are a progression of traditional jokes in which Italians are the butts but with a modern twist.

In this accessible book, Delia Chiaro provides a fresh overview of the language of jokes in a globalized and digitalized world. The book shows how, while on the one hand the lingua-cultural nuts and bolts of jokes have remained unchanged over time, on the other, the time-space compression brought about by modern technology has generated new setting...

Humosexually Speaking - Laughter and the Intersections of Gender investigates the social function of humour produced in, against and about gender variant communities of speakers, in both verbal and multimodal forms. The editors’ leading idea was to ignite an academic discussion on the several and often hidden ways through which humour succeeds in c...

This chapter sets out to identify the diverse types and functions of laughter occurring in How Clean Is Your House?, a lifestyle makeover show that ran for five seasons on UK Channel 4 between May 2003 and September 2009. While this ‘before and after’ format is instructive in terms of tips regarding household tasks, it is also very funny. In fact,...

Food, the cornerstone of life, lies at the heart of our cultural identity. Vital for our health and well-being, our awareness of its economic, cultural and social significance - how the language of food and related practices travel across languages and cultures cannot be disregarded. Despite a rapidly expanding market for translation of food relate...

One of the many effects of the new economy has been the deconstruction of traditional market channel distribution. Today, the traditional ‘producer-wholesaler-retailer-consumer’ sequence of buying and selling is changing as the World Wide Web has created a direct link between producer and customer (B2C) and between producer and producer (B2B). Like...

Language and food are universal to humankind. Language accomplishes more than a pure exchange of information, and food caters for more than mere subsistence. Both represent crucial sites for socialization, identity construction, and the everyday fabrication and perception of the world as a meaningful, orderly place. This volume on Culinary Linguist...

Audiovisual translation (AVT) is the term used to refer to the transfer from one language to another of the verbal components contained in audiovisual works and products. Feature films, television programs, theatrical plays, musicals, opera, Web pages, and video games are just some examples of the vast array of audiovisual products available and th...

'Little Britain' arrived on British TV in 2003 – and was an instant hit. Matt Lucas and David Walliams wrote and performed, and their sharp satirical genius created this character-based sketch show – Vicky Pollard, Dafydd 'I'm the only gay in the village', Ting Tong Macadangdang are hard to forget. Its huge popularity as cult-comedy on radio, then...

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in...

This is the first edited volume dedicated specifically to humor in interaction. It is a rich collection of essays by an international array of scholars representing various theoretical perspectives, but all concerned with interactional aspects of humor. The contributors are scholars active both in the interdisciplinary area of humor studies and in...

This essay explores the implementation of a stereotypically Italian attribute, passion, in the promotion of Italian beverages via the Internet. Twenty websites promoting different types of alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages were examined in order to see how the concept of passion was adopted and whether, and if so, how the concept of passion cha...

Screen translations, and especially those for the small screen, are consumed by millions of people in Europe, and of course all over the non-English speaking world, at every moment of the day.1 In this respect, Italy is representative of the many nations which require evergrowing amounts of interlingual mediation for both big and small screen. As i...

This essay sets out to explore a number of social issues related to present day food culture in the UK and the role translation has played in enhancing the shift that has occurred in the concept of foreignness as portrayed in texts related to cookery, especially over the past 50 years. In particular, it will examine the way in which, in culinary co...

Despite the widespread emergence of translations and diverse types of language mediation in contemporary society, our knowledge of the processes and operators involved in the "translation industry" is still very sketchy. With most translation scholars working within the liberal arts paradigm, research to date has tended to adopt methodologies perta...

Apesar da falta de atenção dada pelo mundo acadêmico à percepção e satisfação do público em relação à Tradução Audiovisual, é claro que vários elementos lingüístico-culturais de textos dublados podem ser problemáticos para os espectadores estrangeiros e, desta forma, merecem ser considerados. Por exemplo, como os espectadores lidam com as numerosas...

This paper will present and discuss the results of an empirical study on perception of quality in interpretation carried out on a sample of 286 interpreters across five continents. Since the 1980’s the field of Interpreting Studies has been witnessing an ever growing interest in the issue of quality in interpretation both in academia and in profess...

One of the many effects of the new economy has been the deconstruction of traditional market channel distribution. Today, the traditional 'producer-wholesaler-retailer-consumer' sequence of buying and selling is changing as the World Wide Web has created a direct link between producer and customer (B2C) and between producer and producer (B2B).1 Lik...

1. publ Bibliogr. na s. 124 - 127

As is well known, the translation of Verbally Expressed Humour (VEH) is an especially thorny issue both practically and theoretically. This paper sets out to discuss the sphere of VEH on screen and how it is received by audiences who are exposed to instances which are mediated linguistically by means of dubbing. 1. Humour and Screen Translation The...