Verbal Humour in Screen Translation: Officer Crabtree’s Case with the Fronch and Hungarian Longwodge

Abstract

Abstract The present study aims to gain insight into the translation of audiovisual humour displayed in the verbal manifestations of Officer Crabtree, the fictional character in the BBC sitcom ‘Allo ‘Allo! (1982–1992), especially focusing on its Hungarian dubbed version of the series. Being a research domain with insights from audiovisual translation (AVT), humour studies, and discourse analysis, the article introduces the reader to AVT, more particularly, to dubbing, to research carried out in the domain of audiovisual humour, and to humour studies, especially focusing on incongruity and superiority theory. These theoretical elements are applied in the analysis of the corpus comprising the English voice track as source text (ST) and its Hungarian counterpart as target text (TT), highlighting the humorous effects achieved in both of them and especially pointing at the creative solutions translators resorted to in rendering the idiosyncratically mangled English texts into Hungarian. The analysis aims to provide counterexamples to the frequent claim that verbal humour is untranslatable.