Use Of Humor In The Simpsons

The Specific Challenges of English to French Adaptation

Illustrated in The Simpsons

The translation of humorous English-speaking television material to French has raised many issues of both linguistic and cultural nature (Vandaele 33). Watching a dubbed version of one’s favorite television show has sometimes proven startling: hearing prerecorded laughs when you did not identify a joke, distinguishing a failed attempt at being funny, or simply not understanding a gag are issues many viewers have had. Sometimes, the humor might also lie in the use of a dialect or of specific words. The famous American sitcom The Simpsons has been adapted in many countries to both the target language and culture. The series is, therefore, a great example of

Therefore, humor is best understood within a group that shares similar education, values and customs (Vandaele 33). On the one hand, their shared knowledge dictates their common humor; on the other, they have the same biases (Vandaele 34). Vandaele identifies three types of issues in the translation of humor: connotations, linguistic variation and the form-content relationship (35-36). The following will analyze the question of linguistic variation, since it is used a lot in The Simpsons. In English, regional accents reflect social classes, both in the United Kingdom and in America (Armstrong 98). Thus, in The Simpsons, the accents used give us an idea of who the character is, especially thanks to the voicing actors’ sometimes exaggerated accents, which depict their most recognizable traits (Armstrong 103). In France, however, only two accent groups can be identified – the Northern and Southern accents – and those have nothing to do with social class (Armstrong 99), as French is subjected to some leveling of the standard pronunciation (Ferrari 26). In the series, the adaptors chose to balance this loss by replacing the linguistic variation with lexical variation, since French has a countless quantity of slang terms – more than English –, which a considerable part of the population uses (Armstrong 101). Nevertheless, I believe the translators could have tried using accents from Switzerland,

This is what Ferrari calls appealing to local communities while keeping the original global reach of the series (Ferrari 21). The Simpsons has a host of secondary characters that are much more realistic than the main ones, as they usually illustrate common stereotypes of people and have very distinct ethnic features (Ferrari 22). These characters can easily be indigenized into the new culture, as Davies suggested with her “switchable jokes”, even if this might uncover other challenges for translators (Davies 150; Ferrari 25). Ferrari uses the concept of indigenization, the re-territorializing process that the series undergoes in order to be properly adapted to the target culture (Ferrari 25). Going through this process has greatly affected many minor characters like school bus driver Otto Mann – whose name was changed to “Disc” as he wants to become a guitarist and whose mama’s boy attitude was perfectly translated through the Italian stereotype of the mammone – and police officer Clancy Wiggum, who has been given a Neapolitan accent, highlighting his comic side