Identifying and Translating Irony across Cultures

Abstract:

Emerging as an approach to life, in which the ironist adopts an attitude of scepticism and mistrust in relation to everyday language (Colebrook 2004), irony can be considered a particular aspect of daily conversation and, as Gibbs and Colston (2001:187-200) aptly remark, it “[…] is particularly useful in conveying both humorous and hostile attitudes in everyday communication” and it is elicited mostly via implicatures and inferences (Attardo 2001).

Much of the research on irony has focused on the rhetorical use of it in literature and poetry (Byron, 1972), written and spoken language (Anolli, Ciceri and Infantino:2002) or in relation to humour (Chiaro, 2006). Since irony is subjective and pervasive in language, this work aims to build up an objective framework that can contribute to its identification in conversational settings in a more systematic way. Another research question concerns its usage across cultures, namely English and Italian.

In order to carry out this analysis 10 different American and British films have been chosen from different genres and some selected ironic exchanges have been investigated. The comparative analysis between the English and the Italian version has taken into account Pavesi’s (2005) and Malone’s (1988) strategies even though, translation strategies do not constitute one of the purposes of my research, but only a means which help the investigation of the transposition of the Language Devices which convey irony from a language to another. In other words, these strategies allow to shed light on the cultural factors which are behind the choices of the elements for translating irony. Contrastively speaking, in ironic contexts exaggeration seems to be more pervasive in Italian than in English in line with the cultural orientations outlined by Katan (2004).

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