‘Look What the Cat Dragged’ in Telecinematic Dialogue: An Inter- and Cross-cultural Approach to Translating a Highly Idiomatic SBU into Spanish
This paper takes an intercultural approach to rendition strategies of one specific pragmatic idiom in scripted telecinematic discourse: Look what the cat dragged in. While this formulaic punchline (cf. Kirner-Ludwig, 2023; Kirner-Ludwig & Soboleva, 2022) demonstrates a relatively high salience in the US particularly in scripted genres, it offers more than one option for translators seeking to render it for other speech communities in a manner that acknowledges its source meaning as well as its target cultural appropriateness. We shall focus here on continental Spanish as one specific target culture in order to demonstrate the versability that this cognitively multi-faceted formula poses for its appropriation into this cultural sphere. Our study is based on a self-compiled parallel dataset of context-embedded source occurrences of look what the cat dragged in and their renditions into continental Spanish. For these renditions we do not only take into account the auditive layers as to be perceived on screen, but also the subtitles that, as we shall demonstrate, tend to differ from the former. Bringing these levels of rendition together in our analysis offers immediately contrastive insights into the rendition strategies that translators have been employing in order to interculturally transfer this highly evasive idiomatic formula from one speech community into others.
References
Kirner-Ludwig, M. & A. Soboleva. (2022). That’s what she said: a formulaic punchline bound to be lost in translation? An intercultural discussion of English-German-Russian renditions. The European Journal of Humour Research 10(3), 113–37.
Kirner-Ludwig, M. (2023). Formulaic Humor and Humorous Conversational Routines in fictional telecinematic discourse – a corpus-assisted study conjoining Phraseology, Pragmatics and Humor Studies. [Habilitational thesis, University of Innsbruck, Austria].