Translation of Adult-Oriented Humour in Children’s Animated Movies: A Corpus-Based Study

Abstract

The aim of this thesis is to examine the translators’ strategies in translating adult-oriented linguistic humour in children’s animated movies. The research presents a corpus-based mixed study which draws insights from humour translation, translation of children’s literature (most especially the address problem in children’s literature), and audiovisual translation. The corpus-data was collected from forty Hollywood-made animated movies released between the years of 2010-2019. In order to distinguish a humorous instance as adult-oriented, Akers’ (2013) adult humour filters were applied to the source and target data. The translation strategies applied to the target movies were categorised in accordance with their functions as retainment, replacement, and omission. The classification of translation strategies used in this study was developed relying on the available translation strategies of Delabastita’s (1996) for puns, Leppihalme’s (1997) for allusions, and Mateo’s (1995) strategies for irony. Further, the data were interpreted both qualitatively in accordance with Asimakoulas (2004) theoretical model for the translation of humour and quantitively. The analysis of the corpus-data revealed that in order to preserve the adult humour, the most successful translation strategies belong to Replacement Set while the least successful translation strategy set is Omission Set. According to the overall results, the general tendency is towards the elimination of adult humour. The thesis aims to contribute to the field of humour translation through initiating an attempt to come up with a guideline for translators in order to overcome possible issues while translating linguistic adult humour in works aimed for children.