Subtitling Culturally Determined Expressions in Stand-Up Comedy from English to Dutch: The Case of Demetri Martin’s The Overthinker (2018) and Live (At the Time) (2015)

Abstract

The translation of humor remains a difficult objective. This pertains particularly to culturally determined expressions. Due to differences between cultures, equivalence in these CDEs is often difficult to obtain. Many theories exist on the translation of humor and subtitling, but there are few specifically related to the subtitling of CDEs in stand-up comedy. This thesis attempts to combine some of these theories, thereby developing a continuum that – if successful – may help predict preferred strategies of translation for CDEs within stand-up comedy. The continuum’s usefulness is tested by comparing its outcomes to the translator’s decisions for two stand-up shows, Demetri Martin’s The Overthinker (2018) and Live (At the Time) (2015). Assumptions made from the results illustrate that the continuum’s predictions are often consistent with the translator’s choices, although there are also instances where the continuum failed to incorporate important factors of, for example, context and creativity. In conclusion, while the continuum’s results were satisfactory, it has merely been used to test the interpretation of the corpus alongside the translator’s decisions, and not to try and prove the continuum’s validity.