ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 discusses a number of intimately interconnected but also unstable concepts in the sense that they evolve with time, can be considered from many angles and appear to have dissimilar meanings for different people and communities: cultural references, humour and ideology. All three are also strongly determined by the languages and language variants that contribute to their concrete expression (Chapter 7). Culture is hardly distinguishable from language, and cultural references are therefore more often than not embedded in language. The potential link between humour and cultural references or between humour and marked language such as taboo words, for instance, is obvious; and ideological manipulation lurks behind many forms of discourse. Like marked language more generally, these three features are a constant of audiovisual productions and present challenges for subtitlers that are strongly dependent on the context in which they occur. The different subsections and categories in the present chapter aim to give readers some insight into the concepts themselves, offering an overview of the subtitling issues that they may present and some tips to facilitate the translation decision-making process.
