Creative Translation in Comedy TV Series: the English-Russian Case

The adaptation of TV-series produced in one country to the other one has always been an issue for translators. It is almost impossible to perform the best version of translation without the losses especially when translators work on the comedy genre. This research investigates the problem based on the comedy TV-series “The Office”. The present research deals with identifying creative solutions which are required in the process of translating comedy TV-series and the paper raises the question of low popularity of the TV-series in Russia which are believed to be due to poor translation. The examples of translational difficulties which require creative solutions were taken from the TV-series and were divided into four groups based on the concept by Ubozhenko I. According to this concept, there are three types of stimuli (stylistic, contextual and extralinguistic). In order to provide an answer to the main question of the paper three versions of translation were compared – “Perviy kanal”, “Kubik v kube” and “Murzilka”. As the result, “Kubik v kube” performed better results than other recording studios due to the complex approach to translation. The results of this work may contribute in the development of the realm of audio-visual translation and may help to upper the level of translation quality.