| Title: | ekspresivnost, humor, besedne igre, metafore, podnaslovno prevajanje, kompenzacija, prevodna strategija, Prijatelji |
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In my master's thesis the main focus is on translating expressive elements in the first season of Friends. Translating expressive elements, which are closely embedded in television humour, represents a real challenge in terms of translation subtitling. A translator should not only have an excellent command of source language but he should also be familiar with source culture in order to sufficiently translate culture-specific references, wordplay, figures of speech, metaphors and other stylistically-marked elements. The aim of the present thesis is to compare a TV- and a DVD-version in relation to expressive language, quality of subtitles and translation strategies. For that purpose, several hypothesis were formed: (1) the same level of expressive language in both subtitle versions is anticipated, including the same number of compensation items and metaphors in the subtitle units; 2. paraphrase is the most common translation strategy; 3. DVD-subtitles are faster and have less condensed content in comparison to TV-subtitles. The last hypothesis is based on the assumption that television audience is more heterogene than supposedly younger audience targeted by DVD-tecnology. On the one hand, the empirical part of the master’s thesis is based on the corpus of source expressive textual segments . It contains the following categories: wordplay, culture-specific references, figures of speech, metaphors and stylistically-marked elements. On the other hand, the corpus of source inexpressive textual segments was created for an analysis of the compensation items. The TV- and DVD-translations were aligned to the source segments. In relation to the translation units, the level and the type of expressive language and the type of translation strategy were determined. The research into metaphors was the most complex analysis and it included the whole corpus of segments. The findings have shown that the DVD-subtitles are more expressive and are of higher quality than the TV-subtitles. A higher degree of expressive language is based on a high proportion of metaphors, culture-specific references and adherent expressiveness, and on the paraphrase as the most common translation strategy. In relation to the latter, the difference between English and Slovene often lies in the different word order – English has fixed word order but Slovene does not – and in the idioms with the same or similar meaning but having a different form. In this case, the paraphrase is more appropriate than the second most common translation strategy – literal translation which, in turn, is more suitable when translating a completely new source metaphor or when there is a linguistic equivalent for a source idiom. Regarding the differences in quantity in terms of subtitles, the results of the analyses have shown that the number of the subtitles in both subtitling versions are surprisingly similar. For this reason, it seems that the type of medium has a scarce impact on the quality of subtitles: in relation to the level of expressive language, types of translation strategies and the number of subtitles per single source segment.
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