Jerry Seinfeld: I'm Telling You For The Last Time, Translation and Commentary

Abstract

Translation of humor is a field that may not have a fair share of research, especially in the English to Arabic field where the cultural aspect may differ more vividly compared to translating into other languages. This thesis looks into the issue of subtitling a movie of a stand-up comedy act titled 'Jerry Seinfeld: I'm Telling You for the Last Time'. It introduces the genre of comedy and sheds light on some of the challenges that accompany the translation such genre. These challenges include translating humor, translating cultural specific terms, and dealing with technical issues of the subtitling. The thesis includes a translation of the script in the form of subtitle alongside the original text. The translation is followed by a commentary discussing the challenges and justifying the choices made while addressing these challenges. The thesis concludes with findings and recommendations for future similar translation attempts. It has been found that translating comedy needs to be addressed with special care of the purpose and the audience of the translation given the genre. A recommendation of the project is that looking at the translation process as a reproduction process, for a translator to be able to translate comedy, they need to be able to able to write comedy. For the purpose of this thesis, a disc of the movie with the Arabic subtitles is produced alongside the thesis to provide an actual audiovisual final product of the translation. The said disc can be obtained upon request by contacting the author and/or the supervisor of this thesis at: abubakr.alani@yahoo.com (the author) sizwaini@aus.edu (the supervisor)