ARE SITCOMS AS FUNNY IN BOSNIAN AS THEY ARE IN ENGLISH – A CASE OF TRANSLATION OF PUNS IN “HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER”

Abstract

This study focuses on the analysis of puns in the American situational comedy How I Met Your Mother (Kako sam upoznao vašu majku in Bosnian). The paper aims to categorize the puns and then classify the employed translation strategies in the subtitling process of the noted puns from the source language English into the target language Bosnian. The categorization of puns was conducted on the basis of Delabastita’s (1996) division of puns into homonymic, paronymic, homophonic, and homographic. Similarly, Delabastita’s (1996) classification of translation strategies was used to analyze their Bosnian translation equivalents. This classification includes three translation strategies: pun-to-pun, pun-to-zero, and pun to a related rhetorical device. The created corpus consists of transcripts of the first two seasons of the aforementioned TV show. The findings, presented descriptively and numerically, reveal that homonymic and paronymic puns are the most frequent, while homophonic puns are somewhat less common. Moreover, homographic puns are absent altogether. Omission (pun-to-zero) is the dominant translation strategy (56%), leading to a significant loss of humor, while the use of related rhetorical devices and direct translations (pun-to-pun) are present in 26% and 18% of cases, respectively. Homophonic puns are most frequently translated using the pun–zero strategy, reflective of their complexity. The study indicates potential challenges of translating humor, which in turn reveals a need for more creative approaches to humor translation. Therefore, potential further research focusing on the exploration of translation strategies used across different languages could help preserve the intended humorous effects of wordplay.