Translation of Irony in the Hungarian Subtitles ofDownton Abbey

This paper proposes to analyse ironic utterances in the British TV series Downton Abbey (Season One) by comparing the English source text (ST) irony found in the script of the film to its subtitled variant of the Hungarian target text (TT). First the literature of the domain is surveyed in order to draw attention to the difficulty of rendering irony in audiovisual subtitles which emphasises that, as a multidisciplinary area, it involves not only audio and visual, but also verbal and non-verbal factors. This section is followed by a brief survey of irony theories highlighting the incongruence factor of irony, which also needs to be rendered in the TT After offering an outline of the story, several examples of ironic utterances are discussed, applying the dynamic equivalence method.