Abstract (eng)
This master’s thesis intends to determine whether the American television series Breaking Bad is perceived differently in the US and in the German language area (Germany, Austria, Switzerland), so whether the dubbing caused a shift of the prevailing levels of reception.
First, articles from American as well as German, Austrian and Swiss quality newspapers are analysed in order to determine the three most important levels of reception of the series in the US – humour, suspense and social criticism. The biggest difference between the American and the German perception is that German-speaking journalists consider the series much less humorous.
The three levels of reception are then analysed in the German dubbed version as well as the original of the second season of Breaking Bad and the results are presented on the basis of representative examples.
Two functionalist approaches, Skopos Theory and Translational Action Theory, form the theoretical background for this paper. It also contains an overview of research on dubbing as well as television series and a despription of Breaking Bad. Scenes-and-frames semantics form the basis for the analysis, but theoretical findings on (the translation of) humour, suspense and social criticism also contribute to the analysis of the examples.
If you consider the dubbed version and the original as independent products, no shifts in the levels of reception can be established, as the series is mostly suspenseful, but also humorous and contains social criticism in both the German and the English versions. Thus the result of the analysis of the newspaper articles, which showed that humour only plays a marginal role in the German dubbed version of Breaking Bad, cannot be confirmed by the analysis of the second season of the series.
If you compare the two language versions, however, the results are more discriminating: In some parts, the German dubbed version is slightly less humorous than the original and the comic effect is sometimes achieved by different means. There are no considerable shifts on the level of suspense, as the suspenseful scenes and frames are often similar in the two versions. Some of the social criticism is perceived differently by the audiences of the source and the target text, as they do not share the same cultural background and their experiences differ, as well.