Top 10 Signs Your Humour Has Been Subtitled: The Case of the Late Show with David Letterman

The present contribution sets out to investigate the way verbally expressed humour travels cross-culturally through translation from English into Italian in a specific kind of AVT, i.e. subtitling. In order to exemplify the main difficulties inherent to this particular form of translation when applied to the adaptation of humorous content, an analysis has been carried out based on examples from a specific TV genre, the talk show genre, and a specific show, the Late Show with David Letterman. This material was chosen on the one hand because each episode contains a large number of jokes based on either referential or linguistic elements which are bound to be problematic for translators, and, on the other hand, because of the unusual working conditions in which subtitlers translate the show on a daily basis