Subtitling How I met your mother: the challenges of translating humour

This paper is a case-study of the episode 15 (“Unpause”) of the ninth season of the American sitcom How I met your mother. It discusses translation issues present in that excerpt that regard humour under various forms as well as the series’ format. After analysing the Source and Target texts it focuses on the topic of subtitling sitcoms in France and presents selected norms and solutions found to overcome the challenges of translating comedy. The appendices at the end of this document provide visual illustrations and texts complementary to this analysis. This selected video shows humour under its many linguistic forms of expression. Thus this commentary gives particular attention to the adaptation of language-dependent jokes but also to cultural references and explicit terms - which here aim at creating laughter. The speed of the sitcom’s dialogues the problematic chronology and the polysemiotic quality of this excerpt also represented significant subtitling difficulties.