"Humour across cultures: translation issues and audiovisual products"

Since this paper focuses on the linguistic and cultural strategies used in the translation of verbal irony in one of the first scenes of Notting Hill (1999), it is worth attempting to understand what irony is and how it is perceived by human beings. The theoretical basis for this research has been provided by the original Muecke's classification of irony types (Muecke 1980), later expanded by Mateo (1995) in her comparative studies on the translation techniques in a corpus of English comedies, ranging from Ben Jonson to Oscar Wilde.