“I haven’t had that much fun since labour.” Subtitling sarco-ironic remarks in Gilmore Girls

The purpose of this study is to explore how the potential cues of spoken sarcasm and irony are transferred into written Finnish subtitles in the American television series Gilmore Girls. The aim is to discover how the use of cuing differs between the English source text and the Finnish target text. The research is conducted through qualitative and quantitative analysis and comparison between the two languages. Three (3) episodes from Gilmore Girls are analysed using the Finnish DVD subtitles and the episodes’ English unofficial transcripts. The sarco-ironic remarks and their translations are identified, and their individual sarco-ironic cues are categorised. The number of cues, the number of cues in each category and the number of cue shifts are compared quantitatively in order to find whether the translator uses less or different cues than the writer of the original source text. The qualitative analysis focuses on the cue types used in both texts. The results confirmed the hypothesis of sarcasm and irony being relatively straightforward linguistic phenomena to translate, and the hypothesis of the category of words of reinforcement/trivialising being the most used in conveying sarcasm and irony. However, the study also showed that even though some cues were cut in the translation process, the sarco-ironic meaning was rarely omitted entirely from the translation. The findings also showed that the number of cue shifts was surprisingly low. From these results we can deduce that at least in the context of DVD subtitles, sarcasm and irony can be conveyed also in writing, and even though some cues were omitted or shifted, sarcasm and irony were still detectable in the Finnish subtitles. The language used in DVD translations uses less cues of sarcasm and irony and it could thus be considered less versatile than the original source language.

Colloquial Finnish in Subtitles – a Survey on the British Situation Comedy Peep Show

The use of dialects in audiovisual texts is increasing, but the use of standard language in Finnish subtitles is still the prevalent norm and seldom flouted. This may not be in the best interest of the audience as the way the characters speak – their idiolects – is very important for the atmosphere of the audiovisual text and widely used to give the characters personalities and background. This thesis studies whether the viewing experience could be enhanced by taking the characters’ idiolects into account in subtitling. The study was executed as a survey, and the respondents were recruited from social media and an university of applied sciences. A total of 113 respondents were divided into two groups: the experimental group (n=59) and the control group (n=54). Both groups were shown an excerpt of the British situation comedy Peep Show, but with different subtitles. In the experimental subtitles, three characters were given a written idiolect with a level of colloquial language corresponding to the spoken idiolect of the character, while the control subtitles followed the norm of using standard language. The questionnaire contained background questions, a Likert-scale question and open questions. The quantitative responses were analysed statistically through cross tabulation and Mann–Whitney U test or Kruskal-Wallis test (CI=95%, α=0,05). The results showed a statistically significant difference in keeping track on which of the characters was speaking for the benefit of the experimental subtitles. In the other items no statistically significant difference was found between the groups. In the open questions the use of colloquial language was mostly commented favourably.