Cartoons are frequently characterised by the presence of humorous features. Some American humorous cartoons seem to be moving towards a new trend which sees humorous effect achieved by the seamless integration of two separate worlds – the real world of humans and that of animals or objects – merged into a completely new one, a parody of the world that we live in. Integration takes place at all levels of the multimedia product: image, sound and text. One of the most complex cartoons of this type is Dreamworks’ Shark Tale (2005), which recreates a picture of America in an imaginary ocean.
The current paper analyses the English and Italian versions of Dreamworks’ Shark Tale, considering both dubbing and subtitling into Italian. After discussing the means by which humorous effect is achieved in the original product, attention will move to how humorous effect was recreated in the Italian version. The analysis shows that the newly invented world, based on cultural and linguistic habits of the source language, represents a challenging environment for multimedia translators/adapters. However, good results in subtitling and dubbing have been achieved in the Italian version by adopting compensatory strategies that bank on the translator’s creativity. Most humorous utterances based on assonance, homophony, polysemy or cultural habits were neutralised to compensate for such losses and new and different sources of humour were found in the target language and creatively exploited whenever possible in the rest of the dialogues. As a final adjunct, this paper will argue that cartoons of this type can be effectively used in class for training translators for the practice of subtitling, as their great complexity – the result of higher than normal integration between image, sound and text within the boundaries of a given though invented world – not only obliges students to make ample use of typical subtitling strategies but also to put in a great creative effort.

Francesca BIANCHI graduated in translation in 1995 at the University of Trieste (Italy) with a thesis on linguistics and the teaching of English through new technologies. From 1994 to 2003 she worked as a freelance translator specialising in the information technology and multimedia sector. From 1998 to 2004 she held contracts as a teacher of English in the Universities of Genoa and Pavia. Since 2005, she has been a researcher and lecturer at the University of Salento (Italy). Francesca Bianchi has taken part in several research projects on the use of new technologies for research, teaching and learning. Her research interests include corpus linguistics and the use of quantitative analytical methods in linguistics, English language teaching, subtitling. She has published 15 articles and co-edited a monograph.