LINGUISTIC MEANS OF CREATING A HUMOROUS EFFECT AND THEIR REPRODUCTION IN TRANSLATION ON THE MATERIAL OF THE SITCOM «HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER»

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the peculiarities of creating the humorous effect in the modern English sitcom and its reproduction in translation. The nature, essence and means of creating humor are the issues of interdisciplinary study, as a part of the interests among psychologists, philologists, art scholars, linguists and translators. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the increased interest of scientists to the existence of linguistic phenomena, the issues of «alive» speech, to the understanding of the sociolinguistic nature of humor.

Comic and humor, as related phenomena, arise as a result of a sharp switching of thoughts from one associative context to another. The study revealed the fact, that the humorous effect in the modern English sitcom at the linguistic level is formed by a number of linguistic means, in particular by irony, sarcasm, pun, functioning of the occasionalisms. On the basis of the analysis of English scripts of the sit-com "How I Met Your Mother", the problems that arose during the translation of means of creating the humorous effect are formulated.

Translation of occasionalisms requires from the translator certain verbcreation, the necessity to create individual occasionalisms for the for the purpose of the most meaningful reproduction of the semantics of these units in the translation. Some difficulties also arise while translating irony, which is caused by the difference of the figurative-associative basis of the formation of certain language units, in particular phrasal verbs, which for preserving the humorous effect were reproduced in the translation with the help of compensation. Translation of sarcasm, as a means of creating a humorous effect, doesn’t entail any difficulties, due to the nature of the formation of sarcasm and the presence of full equivalents in the language of the original and translation.

As for the pun, which as a means of creating a humorous effect based on homonymy and/or polysemy, the pun was fully reproduced in the translation only through the case of symmetry in terms of content of the phrasal verb and the possibility of actualization of the direct meaning of the components in both languages. In other cases, the polysemy of verbs, acting as the semantic center of the formation of puns allows reproducing the content of the humorous effect of pun, however, to compensate also the formal structure in the translation is not possible.