Now we have
the honor of having you here.
This close to
the leadership. But.
And Laura simply said yes.
Okay.
Keep in mind, I'm going to start introducing them. Why?
I prefer the computer. Okay.
So mean I don't attend lecture
in the Spanish language and translation in Department
of Modern Languages and Culture of the University of Geneva.
I mean, language, culture and culture and institutions of this
participating countries.
Intercultural communication are language variation.
Language in a department of linguistic and Cultural Studies
of the University of Montana and Region area, and she holds up
the Eastern languages, cultures, and that these
are what we think offers interpreting
for the University of Strasbourg, France
First Nations
concepts.
Unsuspecting translation of each of these articles,
which both in Italian among each national Jordan.
We are honored often here today
and they are going to talk about humor
and translation in the classroom and into linguistics
so that your stories.
And thank you for being with us.
Thank you very much, Antonio, for your kind introduction.
And thank you, everybody for being here.
It's a great pleasure and we really hope we can
make you laugh a little bit as well, since we're going to talk about humor.
Well, there are going to be some videos
in Spanish, but we presented as a sort of a kind of back translation
that we hope could help everybody, you know, keep up with the pace.
So it's a it's a great honor.
Again, thank you.
What we will be doing this 20 minutes is actually
sharing the didactic experience. Right.
So it's not a case study.
It's just what we did last year in our Department
of Modern Languages and Cultures back at the University of Denver.
Okay.
And we are doing so is specifically talking about humor,
because we thought, well, you know, the bottom line was thinking,
how can this involve more students in the audio
visual translation classroom?
This is a very short outline.
My colleague is going to, you know, give you a little bit
of background, all the theories of humor that we
briefly introduce to students before the practice,
and then we will move to how our audiovisual translation course
was structured and specifically the subtitling part
and some final thoughts.
You know, also question and says, what do you think
about that?
As I said, we started from the assumption personally,
I've worked a lot on accessibility, media accessibility for my Ph.D.
and we started from the assumption that accessibility
we have heard yesterday and today, and we should all hear it every day
is most needed, right?
And when we talk about humor, which is something, you know,
translation is already a challenging and then it's
a challenging task that when when
coming to translating humor, you know,
it can be challenging as well even more, I would say.
And so this is just a very naive example. But,
you know, focusing on this interesting topic, Trans Pass
and providing accessibility also in the fields of humor,
we talked about them, the stand up comedy.
Okay, what we're going to talk about today is also specifically
about stand up comedy, which is the, you know,
the type of humor monologue that we chose for the for the lessons.
And so for is
that we started from, again, the assumption that
working with
a topic that can be involving, you know, in engaging, maybe we could
tackle and better improve some of the skills of the students.
They are in a master's degree in translation and interpreting
the masters where we teach.
And so why not, you know,
see if also like at a semantic, pragmatic level,
working with cultural driven items and humor again,
that how can they improve if that can strengthen as well?
You know, that translation expertise in general and effectively
this is a yes, but you know, that's pretty straightforward.
But yes, they were more highly involved in the in the lesson itself.
So this is the bottom line.
And I would leave you the word for.
Yeah, humor.
So at the very beginning of
the course, I have to give them some theoretical
information about humor.
They know what humor is, but
we took along about it.
We know that it's part of communication based on an
incongruence.
And it is important to say this word.
And what is the secret of for a successful outcome?
It is the activation of mental scripts and their opposition
and according to a very particular situation.
So the key word for a successful outcome is a defined target.
And that strategy and a choice
of linguistic tools. And.
We talk about jokes and the difficulty
of of the translation and sketches.
We all take irony, but
that's
a the
of course, the main part of the course is about the human monologue.
So do you know blood to a punchline.
Imagine that a narrative interruption complication.
So the role audio in the audience because we have a live
audience and also public watching it.
So and verbal and non verbal cues
and at beginning I give them
this part of theory.
I won't talk about this now because of
time reason, and I tell them
that the context is very important
and asking takes into consideration in the script as a verbal unit
and words as packets of semantic correlations.
It's very important for humor.
Then we the attack, do we add the part of pragmatics also very,
very important because we have to to start
to give them some
informations about what
Grice told about
the cooperation principle and some of its maxim
that can be violated if you want to obtain a humorous effect
and the inference relevant theory.
So it's the process of inferring that listeners determine
if something is humorous or not or not.
The public is very, very important.
And so we are we're talking about a monologue.
We have a comedian on stage, a standing comedian with a dark
lightning.
It's a shorter duration and and a story.
It can be more or less monologue and
we know that it's something over.
It seems spontaneous, but it isn't.
There's a script.
It's more or less planned, which more or less feedback.
And it's important to underline the tone.
It's an informal tone and the subjects are current
events, facts, traditions, attitudes, and
they use hyper balls, repetition, concepts, wordplay.
So we will see some examples of this humor
and the way we work with it right.
So back to the the chorus itself.
As I said, that's a masters in translation and interpreting.
We approximately have ten students every year, right?
So that's a small amount of students.
It really varies from 8 to 1213.
And so this really allows us to work on workshops
and practice a lot, right?
It's not big numbers and it's the second year of the master's degree.
I think it's worth mentioning that we try to give them also,
like the bigger the broader picture concerning media accessibility.
So they have a part of from the linguist time they module
a non-compulsory course one for two years
of inter and interesting were we speaking
and also like an introduction to order description
will tell you a little bit more in detail.
You know this this aspect later but it's very new for a university.
It's not something that we
that has been tackled before it.
So I guess that that could be of interest
and and so the into lingual subtitling it's Spanish to Italian them
and of course we also give, you know, some theory
and background for the subtitling of the deaf and hard of hearing
it lasts
20 hours and this is just to give you maybe a little bit
more clear picture of what is that we do.
As I said, there is some theoretical framework
that is being introduced about subtitling characters, Berlin
and best practices and guidelines about subtitling
we work with.
I just hope I've heard some of the presentations yesterday.
That, you know.
Some of the colleagues worked with that and it's an online free tool.
I have a picture
that shows that for those of you might not be familiar with it.
And then of course, we practice with the tool
and then the subtitling part is actually divided into two stages.
So the first stage is
working on the translation from the source text
into a target text, but not synchronizing the subtitles.
Okay, That's not that.
That's only the last part of the of the practice
in which they really actually create subtitles and work with synchronicity.
And, you know, they have the final video product with subtitles.
We worked with Will as said you were monologue and the stand up
comedy, and we chose Extract from Danny Read advice to Save Eager.
Yeah, but maybe not everybody are familiar with them.
But one is come from Spain. Maybe is.
So this is what we used and again in the in the source text,
which here is text opatija is there were some interesting
in our opinion characteristics again you more
trust cultural features
will idioms and also in some cases
swearing or sex related vocabulary
which had to do very much with,
you know, the level of acceptance that, you know,
public Italian audience and Spanish audience can have,
which is not to take for granted.
In our opinion.
That was the the idea of the age is.
So if you if you don't know that that's very basic and allows you to
to have a, you know, free online tool that works
for our purpose at list
and then, well, again, we will start with some example
of the work that the students carried out. Right.
This is in Spanish, but we will go through, of course,
some comment later.
Right.
So just with 20 seconds is already something challenging.
I mean, how how do you do that? Writing
this is done is of Aida, Right.
And of course, also necessary that an adviser to the characteristic
of their prosody and speech rate that's basically the same
and it's a stand up comedy.
So if you're thinking about translating and subtitling it,
I'm already sweating.
It. Also, there's a lot in here, but, you know, okay.
And so right
here we just want to a small examples in still Danny to read the
liberal outwardly fellow on this better no John Garcia of flute
that I write stand up comedy okay so sometimes not that
deep humor but but still and here it's work
and you know playing on the the verb waiting is better in Spanish.
So how long have you been waiting for the bus stop?
Which is actually you?
How long have you been at appear a Cepeda, which is the fruit.
Okay.
So it basically plays on that and so student after long thoughts
and, and you know, possible solutions, they completely changed it.
They, they twisted it
because at a semantic level, they couldn't, you know, stick to it.
And so they go does the bus number
three stop here, which could also be intended?
Are you I mean you person who who am I talking to.
Are you coming by in on the third,
which is of course the punch line, you know,
and jump line with.
No, I'm on holiday that day right.
And then this one very quickly
they gave to solution because they were
just trying to rub their head about, you know, around it.
But they couldn't get course, only if you're getting dressed
down or some bolero
and they tried to literally like.
Word.
By word translated, you know, with the trans, which in Italian it's
not the case of plants, which is both floor and lines.
But that would I mean, it does make people laugh.
I mean, it doesn't make sense, of course.
And so they they went for, again, like completely
twist of the of the of the plot or the plot
and they talked about steel a building with 300 floors
which peony is actually floors in Italian.
But we decided to have so many compound words with Peony
Pianoforte piano by rabbinic artisans.
It is actually a very literal
translation that doesn't make sense any in English.
But, you know, just to give you the idea. Right.
Good.
And then we have it necessary down very short.
Again.
Right. So
just to underline, yes,
I will be scouring the, you know, a right in Italian.
They just got something like has Romans died like already?
Of course we're getting married.
But there was no reason why why, why to like that.
And of course, there was this first moment
in which we were talking about fighting and they were like,
are we really talking about farting in the in the translation class,
you know, and some other interesting,
you know, example, which was you've been talking
about how effective is poor featured there?
And they they really worked a lot on that.
And they of course if you talk in English about Monica Hall,
people just don't know what you're talking about.
And so they went for another Nobel Prize.
She was he was science.
I guess, but she was medicine which has a double surname, right?
Rita Levi-Montalcini And so they maintained also,
you know, the length and the double surname and you know,
semantically that was I know we thought that could be interesting,
not knowing the retaliating mentality.
For the same example. Right.
And finally, as we tried to explain, you know,
the final step was actually to produce subtitles and synchronize them
and create an MP for video with the subtitles themselves.
Aarti, have you worked just on the translation
with that here they had to face the again
time constraints and space constraint of the screen and everything,
and they did so with extracts
and sketches by to still very similar characteristics.
Again, like very speech, very fast speech and then high speech trait.
Here is just one
small example.
You laugh.
Already.
And well, here just to stress the galley materials, right?
I mean, she's glad to see some element.
The organism they own does not do that Well, Again, different students,
they tried very different ways to translate it.
One of those was Jeremy Minton interrogating evil
in the meaning of a doubt, a question, something that was unclear.
Mr. Cows okay.
And of course, interrogative also means like question mark in Italian.
So that says no, not the punctuation mark, but the doubt.
And some others were, you know, when for galley materials
in in italics,
which is fine.
I mean it's interesting is Mutti actually in Italian is a name
you know a male name for pretty common to be honest.
And so just for the sound
and the similarity could work to some extent, right.
I think I don't have time to go through this.
And so very basically.
But what we, of course,
we submit is a questionnaire, the sign on completion, of course.
And among these ten students we had last year
on a liquid scale, the maximum was five.
Well, everybody expressed a very high level of satisfaction.
And, you know,
I would say interestingly, because we were very happy,
they also mentioned that the broader
aspect of media accessibility and the introduction,
they had an audio description and we speaking some of them,
they really were like, Wow, we keep hearing about these things.
And finally we were talking about that, which is,
you know, presumably something not to be taken for granted
because it's more and more, you know, becoming more and more important. So
yeah, that was our didactic experience and we thank you for your attention.
If you have any question.
Well, thank you for such an inspiring talk.
I think we have all learned a lot because humor and accessibility
are important topics for translators and for the whole society.
And the way in which I approach that and the humor was amazing.
I want to ask the audience if you have any doubts about the presentation
of gold,
because when you first mentioned into lingual
subtitling and SDH combined together, I almost panicked.
I said that to the students. It's quite a challenge.
Yeah, it's a twofold challenge.
But then you said it was
stand up comedy.
So I guess in stand up comedy, SDH is in much more trouble
because you will have perhaps a different kind of laughter or normal.
That's it. That's in the room.
But not many of the sound triggers, so to speak.
But I'm quite interested in how you dealt with display play rates
and reading speeds, because they do speak very, very fast and with.
SDH Only to find the lower
display rates, otherwise it hampers comprehension.
So I was wondering if you had these kind of discussions with the students
and well, how those discussions went.
Hydes were just very briefly, thank you very much for your question.
Yeah, you know,
I wanted to comment on this, but then time was
already running out of these example and I didn't say anything,
but of course, well, they were.
The talk is done for the accessibility reasons of, you know, eliciting
sound features was a resource,
you know, and, and a reason.
They actually we also discussed about the fact that they could have said
Gran did is
out there recited farrago rules I mean working a little bit
more on the type of laughter that was caused
as as a punchline in the in the in the audience.
But that was it in the example of Dani Rovira.
I'm not going to play it again, of course,
But when he does this, you know, referring to that motorcycle.
So that was quite a challenge.
We left it out.
I'm sorry to me that we left it out.
I mean, when
when they had to this stage, it wasn't creating the subtitles themselves.
It was just, you know, you work on the translation.
And so they, you know, square parentheses and they said
sound similar to a motorcycle or something like that.
But they didn't actually had to to do that,
you know, to, to create the subtitles and.
We of.
Course also talked through the, the speed.
And what they did was we gave out two
which was the one that they actually subtitle and
condense a lot.
So we worked on, you know, condensation
very much but that was quite a challenge.
Of course we did that also in class, so they did both back to the ten
great amount of students that allow for allows for, you know, workshops.
They did some cards in the class and then back at home.
And so, you know, they could ask doubts and try it out
and then go back.
It was really slow process because it's really amateurs for them.
And first approach to the subject, if
if this answers your question, I mean, absolutely.
I mean, I'm thinking like early career
estate professionals,
we struggled to condense a lot because they assumed that they have to
basically make everything fit on on the captions.
So I was wondering how they responded to this kind of,
Oh, no, actually, you have to, you know, a lot of information.
Also goes in the introduction of, you know, talking about accessibility.
You know,
there are a lot of supporters of the fact
that if you condense, that's not what it's being said.
And so you are cut out of a lot of information.
And so that was point of a debate.
You know, how much and how you can tell.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
But didn't.
You just say is that we are going to it works.
Because students loved it so yeah
and it's actually going to
my question are you supposed to enjoy it.
So do you think that this can be
blown up as a proportion of the debates and something vague
evidence like this?
If I have a cigaret reading this is par for the course or
yeah, just the whole module on translation, right?
Or was this it was.
You know, we only focused on humor.
I mean, sorry,
but yeah, the 20 hours was only dedicated to the humor,
you know, translation.
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so are. You going to do.
This, Are you going to do other types of comedy.
That is in society. Stand ups?
To be honest, again, we haven't thought it through,
but yes, I mean, absolutely. Yes.
Because that would be very interesting also.
But what you said, you know, to vary and.
Challenges would be different. Yeah.
I like to work with jokes,
but it's really, really difficult.
We have very good to do.
Yes. That
and then another question I had to I make is about how you write it.
All right.
You mention that it's something like based on stories like this,
how was the grades.
The satisfaction questionnaire?
You mean assessment?
Oh, did you.
Ask for that production in Spanish?
I'm assuming, because.
How did you grades.
Yeah, well, basically the audio is a translation through
subtitle in module is 20 hours, but then the course is 60, right.
Isn't it. 60.
The entire one entire.
One is 120. 120.
Yes. We, they shouldn't get it right.
So they have a final average of every single module
that they submit submitted what we do and how we assess them again
pretty straightforwardly and I would say almost informally,
but not it is they do this
past year in the class the lessons.
Then they work from home on their product.
So they subtitle a video of their
yeah, how they are choosing and at the exam they come,
they show it to us and we comment on the topic.
Yeah.
And the strategy they use on how
that could have been improved or you know, how could you.
Say where they go right and work on this slide and then they come in.
And so this is an exam. Yeah.
And then they are asked about, well did you.
Think
we direct
marketing. So this has, you
know, you just lectures, ask them some difficulties.
I mean, already you could argue that you know, the market education product
as it is to some extent is subjective.
It is actually if you like. It and you are, you know.
It's even more so it is it's let's say
just free of a close up observation of the students also throughout
the course can of course can do that because they're ten.
And so we really work as like
a team face to face every every time that we have a lesson.
And so it's more of like close observation and improvement,
how and how participation, active participation and involvement
and then their ability to comment and argue and what they've done.
Yeah, basically a thank you.