O humor na interpretação simultânea da 75° edição do Emmy Awards sob a perspectiva da Teoria da Relevância

Abstract

This research analyzes the challenges of simultaneous interpreting at media events based on the humorous speeches at the 75th Emmy Awards. The study is based on the Relevance Theory, proposed by Ernst-August Gutt (2014), who suggests that effective communication depends on the relationship between the effort expended by the interpreter to ensure original speech’s contextual effects comprehension and the effort expended by the audience to comprehend those effects. The aim is to investigate the interpreters’ choices when faced with jokes and references situated in a cross-cultural context, and how these decisions impact the reception of humor by the Brazilian audience. To this end, eight humorous moments from the Emmy Awards broadcast were selected, and compared to the oral versions in English and their interpretations in Portuguese. The analyses were based on the simultaneous interpreting strategies proposed by Morais and da Silva (2023), and on the taxonomy of Long and Graesser (1998), who classifies different types of humor. The results show a tendency towards moderate cultural adaptation, which highlights two specific strategies, and creates different degrees of relevance and maintenance of implicatures, which are more difficult to maintain than explicatures.