Tradurre l'umorismo nella comunicazione d'ambito medico in serie tv tedesche: il caso di Bettys Diagnose Translating Humor in the Medical Workplace as represented in German TV Series: A Case Study of Bettys Diagnose (original) (raw)

This article analyses humorous dialogues from the first season of the German medical TV series Bettys Diagnose (2015) on the basis of Raskin and Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humor (1991). First, the gender of the participants, socio-professional hierarchies, and specialized language are identified as criteria for classifying humorous interactions. Applying a qualitative approach, the study investigates the linguistic ambiguity found in numerous exchanges based on opposing scripts in the medical workplace. It demonstrates how humor can often conceal aggressive attitudes, help manage critical situations and aim at teasing other speakers. The analysis of specific dialogues sheds light on the knowledge gaps between clinicians and patients and the related effects of misunderstandings that may occur, regardless of the speakers' language and cultural background. At the same time, humor seems to convey — more or less overtly —gender-related issues and social tensions between communities and subcommunities, as well as between different professional roles. Other dialogues in the series reveal how humor can also contribute to reducing the daily emotional burden of people facing trauma, fear, and pain, thus serving as a coping strategy. The essay also considers both voluntary and involuntary, verbal and non-verbal forms of humor. Subsequently, the article presents proposals for interlingual subtitling in Italian, selected on the basis of the dominant tone of the dramedy series examined (Nord, 1993) and consistent with the dynamic and compelling dialogues typical of oral communication. Specific strategies (Díaz Cintas & Remael, 2007) were thus identified and employed to render those humorous exchanges in which gender, socio-professional hierarchies, and specialized language play a relevant role. This section distinguishes between cases of correspondence between the two language systems (German and Italian) and cases requiring a more creative intervention by the translator. The study identifies some trends in the fictional representation of communication in hospital settings in German as well as in interlingual subtitling in Italian. These results could be further consolidated on a quantitative level through the analysis of larger corpora of dialogues from German TV series with similar topics, settings, and genres.