El papel del elemento visual en la traducción del humor en textos audiovisuales. ¿Un problema o una ayuda?

It is a well-known fact that the audiovisual text constitutes a type of text essentially characterized by the transmission of information via two channels: the acoustic and the visual ones. Different channels mean different problems or restrictions. Focusing on the visual aspect, in this article I present part of the results of my research on the translation of humour in audiovisual texts. One of its main conclusions is that the visual components, rather than posing a restriction, in many more occasions contribute to a better understanding of the target text and, in the case of humour, to facilitate it, so that it might be advisable to vary the approach with which audiovisual translation is usually analyzed and to cast doubt on the notion of the image as a restrictive factor per se — at least quantitatively. This idea will be illustrated with some examples from The Simpsons.