“Translating Audiovisual Screen Irony” Patrick ZABALBEASCOA TERRAN Universitat Pompeu Fabra patrick.zabalbeascoa@upf.edu in Speaking in Tongues: Languages across Contexts and Users, edited by Luis Pérez González, English in the World Series, Edicions Universitat de València, 2003 Summary A threefold study is presented. There is a proposal for defining and analysing audiovisual (AV) texts in order to situate AV translation more precisely within translation studies. There is a review of irony considering various typologies, including audiovisual irony, as this is considered an important point for translators of feature films and television programmes. Finally, there is a case study of AV irony based on the first 8 minutes of Trainspotting. There are important conclusions for the theory and practice of translation for dubbing and subtitling, and by extension for other modes of translation, given the fact that irony is so common in all sorts of texts. This film was chosen because of the importance that irony has in it as a form of expression in AV communication, a wide range of possibilities for combining verbal and non-verbal elements is exploited to the full. The examples under analysis, mostly from Trainspotting, provide highly interesting information for the characterization of the AV text on a plane defined by a verbal/ non-verbal axis and an audio/ visual axis. Each axis is a continuum spanning from more to less (presence, importance) of verbal and non- verbal items, on the one hand, and visual (photography, writing) and audio (music, speech), on the other. Each problem, or feature, can be mapped onto such a plane according to these continua. Furthermore, it is essential to be fully aware of all the possible relationships between one element and another. Types of relationships proposed in this article are: complementarity, contradiction, separability and redundancy. After taking all of this into account, a model of AV translation is proposed as an alternative to the concept of constrained translation, one that has closer contact to the concepts of adaptation and (verbal/ non-verbal) compensation.