Rendering means of multimodal representation of celebrities in American comedy animated sitcoms in translation

Abstract

This article presents the results of comparative analysis of the strategies of rendering mono- and multimodal parodic representations of celebrities from the American comedy animated sitcom “BoJack Horseman” in English-Ukrainian and English-Russian translations. The study had revealed monomodal parodic representations of celebrity characters realized verbally by using the name in a dialogue and multimodal parodic representations, both literal and based on pun, that are realized by the interaction of the name, image and sound. The study has found that monomodal parodic representations constitute a translation problem due to their allusive potential, reproduction of which in the case of cultural / subcultural specificity of allusion is solved by domestication. Translation of literal multimodal representations constructed by real celebrity names and close-to-real images is performed by transcoding. Translation of visual puns causes no difficulties since in their case incongruity is created by the images. Translation of verbal-visual puns that are constructed via interaction of a pun name and a metaphoric anthropomorphic image is not problematic only if the name is easily recognizable and the target language has resources to retain the pun. The study has revealed that to render such puns Ukrainian translators mostly resort to domestication by means of substitution. Russian translators employ foreignization by means of transcoding that leads to the loss of the correlation between the text and image and the loss of the humorous effect. Transcoding is relevant only if the name of a celebrity is generally known and correlates with the image. If the name is culturally or subculturally specific, transcoding leads to foreignization of the target text. The study has found that domestication strategy is more communicatively relevant for reproducing multimodal puns since it allows correlation of the word and image and reproduces the humorous effect.