Translating TV-comedy. How humorous elements seem to have changed in the German version of "How I Met Your Mother"

Seminar paper from the year 2014 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, Ernst Moritz Arndt University of Greifswald, language: English, abstract: This paper deals with the errors in translating TV-Comedy, which lead to humorous effects being lost. A case study of the series "How I met your mother" exemplifies such losses. I picked "How I Met Your Mother" due to its incredible amount of funny aspects and the great diversity thereof, which opens up the content of the show to a wide range of viewers. In this paper, humor shall be looked at from the angle of translation. In order to demonstrate that certain humorous elements are being changed while translating, I observed the comedy series "How I Met Your Mother" in English as well as in German. With the help of former scholarly works, I tried to establish a pattern of categories for the very complex aspect of humor and will try to connect these categories to the variables they are depending on. Since this paper deals with the translation of humor I researched the interrelation of both, which is not fully elaborated yet and bares lots of difficulties. By looking at the differences between the original and the translated versions of "How I Met Your Mother", I will try to demonstrate the above mentioned difficulties of translating humor and show how these problems affect the perception of the TV show in the target language when it comes to funniness.