The strange case of The Big Bang Theory and its extra-ordinary Italian audiovisual translation: a multimodal corpus-based analysis

The (ab)use of a highly scientific and quaintly specialised language characterises the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory as a geek-oriented production which, by means of its humorous multimodal discourse, seems to be addressed to a community of speakers who co-share the same lexicon, ideas and habits, i.e. mainly young nerds. However, while in the source text the humorous discourse is primarily construed around some geeky in-jokes, the Italian audiovisual dubbed product seems to completely change the context of situation, thus avoiding any reference to the specificity of the language of the source text. The result is a predictable failure to accommodate the humorous discourse of the American series, preventing the Italian audience a full appreciation of its subtle humour. By means of an integrated multimodal and corpus-based approach, this paper aims to introduce the ‘community factor’ in the analysis of joke typologies staged in AVT artefacts. A multimodal model, which takes into consideration semiotically expressed humour, is introduced here, with the aim of capturing some interesting instantiations of the humorous discourse and specialised language which need to be re-allocated in the target product.