| In the comedic genre of the media era, the situation comedy (sitcom) on TV has won popularity with a wide audience for its amusing, yet dramatic twists, humorous lines and vivid characterizations. In recent years, an increasing number of sitcoms from foreign countries, particularly the United States, have been presented to a Chinese audience through dubbing and subtitling. These translated sitcoms have aroused great interest and attracted an enthusiastic following in China. It's the point of this dissertation to study how and to what extent that humor in sitcoms can overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers when they are translated into other languages. It also aims at finding whether the dubbed or subtitled sitcoms can successfully elicit a good laugh from the target audience, who not only speak a different language but may not be well acquainted with the source culture. When it comes to comedy, there is an old saying about it:"Comedy travels badly."Although not absolute, it reveals the hardships and challenges that humor must endure in its journey to another culture.Plenty has been said about humor by scholars of the world in various fields. Traditional humor study focuses on the written or the verbally expressed humor but little attention has been given to humor on the TV screen, which is characterized by a multi-semiotic constitution. Presently there is an undeniable trend to find humor no longer confined to literature or simple, daily conversation, but it is more frequently seen in the audiovisual media. Audiovisual humor differs from traditional humor in many ways, for instance, in its set-up and the way it communicates with the audience. Likewise, due to the restraints imposed by the dubbing and subtitling process, translating humor in sitcoms is more complicated and has a more diverse set of challenges than translating humor from written texts. Its aim and scope, as well as the feasible strategies in the trans-cultural communication are worth more attention and further exploration.This dissertation is an in-depth study of the classification of humor in sitcoms from the perspective of its relation to translation, and the factors that hamper effective transmission and the perception of the humor by the audience. Strong support is provided through first-hand data observed and collected by the author directly from the Chinese translations of five popular American sitcoms: Growing Pains, Will and Grace, Seinfeld, Friends and Everybody Loves Raymond. These sitcoms were chosen mainly for their overall popularity, diversity in themes, and the different modes of audiovisual translation.The whole dissertation is composed of seven chapters. Chapter One introduces the causes, significance, aim and means of the study. After reviewing the current research done in the field of humor translation and audiovisual translation, it points out that study of on- screen humor translation has been a long-neglected field. In this regard, it reiterates the necessity and importance of the study of humor translation in sitcoms from the trans-cultural perspective.Chapter Two first summarizes the distinguishing features of the sitcom that make it different from other TV genres and literature works, including canned laughter, frequent amusing conflicts, humorous and colloquial lines which reflect diverse personalities. Different from the traditional humorous texts on one dimension, the humor-intensive sitcoms are characterized by the vivid transmission of verbal and non-verbal signs on visual and auditory channels. Its distinguishing external feature is canned laughter at a regular interval. The translation of humor is further complicated by two major modes of audiovisual translation---dubbing and subtitling. The translator of sitcoms has to comply with the spatial and temporal restraints and meet the requirements of immediate comprehensibility and synchronization. As sitcoms are mainly produced to amuse the audience, it is the humorous effect rather than the semantic information contained in the dialogues that plays a central role. Therefore in dubbing or subtitling, top priority should be given to the reproduction of the original comic effect and its likelihood to amuse the target audience. We believe that familiarity with the mechanics and features of humor in a sitcom would help a translator to facilitate the travel of humor in another language and culture.Chapter Three further distinguishes humor of sitcom from the traditional humor in terms of its poly-semiotic components. Verbal humor (mainly the dialogue between characters) is not the only means to set up humorous scenes or to produce the linguistic variations, rather it is just one of the many components that make the sitcom amusing. Other audiovisual means that also contribute to the overall humor of a sitcom are funny moves, gestures, facial expressions, scene set-up, color etc. These serve as visual stimuli while paralanguage, music, sound effects and the like act to stimulate the auditory senses. Humor presented on the TV screen is more vivid, direct and eye-catching than that in traditional literature. Thus the four channels, namely, nonverbal, verbal, audio and visual channels, are in fact equally important when we examine the translation of sitcom humor. All the amusing nonverbal elements, which accompany the verbal humor, should all be taken into account by the sitcom translator. It is also argued in this chapter that the nonverbal elements tend to be double-edged swords - they often facilitate the transmission of a humorous effect but impose constraints on the dubbing or subtitling. Whether the humorous effect is easy to maintain or not also depends much on its proportion to the nonverbal and verbally expressed humor in a sitcom.Based on the contributions made by Wang Nan, Zabalbeascoa and Diaz-Cintas concerning humor translation, we also make a tentative and innovative effort in re-classifying sitcom humor into five types with regards to its poly-semiotic features, namely visual nonverbal humor, visual verbal humor(words on the screen), audio nonverbal humor, verbal humor and complex humor. Although these five humor types do not all necessarily require the direct efforts of a translator in dubbing or subtitling, they all contribute to the building-up and transmission of the humorous effect intended in the original source text. Thus, the failure of the dubbed or subtitled versions to arouse the target audience's laughter may be caused by many factors other than the translation quality of the verbally expressed humor alone. Each humor type in relation to translation is illustrated in detail by a number of examples from the five sitcoms.The next three chapters of the dissertation focus on verbally expressed humor. We classify verbally expressed humor into three categories according to the extent they depend on linguistic variation and the difficulties they impose on translation. The first category is situational and conceptual humor, which is common and cross-cultural. As humor of this kind is neither culture-specific nor language-specific, it poses the least difficulty for the translation. The second and third categories are wordplay humor and culture-specific humor, and are regarded as most challenging in humor translation. It is undeniable that language and culture are intimately related, therefore the distinction between the above three categories of humor is not totally clear-cut, or exclusive of the other. Rather, they are usually employed harmoniously in each comic scene. Situational and conceptual humor is briefly exemplified in the last section of Chapter Three, while wordplay humor and culture-specific humor is thoroughly examined mainly in Chapters Five and Six respectively.In order to frequently amuse the audience, humor in most sitcoms is based on the shared knowledge between the characters in the play and the audience, thus the perception of humor entails the relevant, cognitive experience to appreciate the humor. In Chapter Four, we analyze three inter-linked factors that influence the perception of humor: linguistic knowledge, social and cultural knowledge, and the ability to associate ideas and to think logically. Lack of any of these factors would probably lead to misunderstanding or confusion among the receivers, and the expected laughter would not forthcoming. These three factors play a very important role in the trans-cultural journey of humor in sitcom. In addition, whether humor in source sitcoms can come across the linguistic and cultural barriers and still be effective in the target language and culture is also determined by other factors like the mode of translation, psychological factors of the audience and the differences in humor tradition and themes between source-language culture and target- language culture. With all of these factors getting in the way, this trans-cultural journey is bound to be a hard one, though not a total"mission impossible."Chapter Five elaborates on how the wordplay humor in American sitcoms is dealt with in the Chinese dubbed or subtitled versions. First, the concept of wordplay humor is defined within the framework of this dissertation. Then five types of wordplay, particularly pun, are explored with care. Wordplay is widely used in sitcoms and closely attached to the linguistic experience. Due to the big linguistic and cultural gap between English and Chinese, it seems but a dream to find, in Chinese, the equivalent of English wordplay both in form and effect. Therefore, the translator has to adapt the original humor to the target language and culture through flexible means, with a prior consideration of how to maintain the humorous effect intended in the wordplay. The strategies applied in wordplay translation are analyzed and illustrated with corresponding, descriptive examples.From the perspective of cultural default, Chapter Six discusses the reconstruction of culture-specific humor in the translation, with a particular focus on the inter-textual humor made up mainly of allusions and parodies. As we all know, as a product of the culture, sitcom is clearly marked by the culture in which it is produced. Sitcom producers and writers assume their viewers'easy familiarity with contemporary American popular culture as the basis for much of their own humor. Thus, many sitcoms are filled with all sorts of brief references and allusions to persons, historical or modern, events or places, real or fictitious, or even to a work of art. With such humor, the audience will be amused only when they easily recognize the close inter-textual connection between the audiovisual scripts in sitcom and the external world they are familiar with. Usually culture-specific humor is not complex linguistically, but it has a high demand for the background knowledge essential for humor perception. Therefore, whether such humor can travel well in its trans-cultural journey depends to a large extent on the cultural paradigm of the target audience, on their ability to retrieve their knowledge and then associate it with the current culture and events. Absence of the corresponding background knowledge would make it hard to understand the original humor, if rendered literally in the dubbed or subtitled version. When a sitcom is introduced and presented to viewers in a different culture, the culture-specific humor that abounds in it is still expected to be effective and cater to the target culture.Through persuasive examples, this chapter argues that for the purpose of maintaining the humorous effect, it is advisable for the translator to make a creative and flexible reconstruction of the cultural items that might hamper the understanding of the target viewers, according to the translator's estimation of the specific function of such items in the humorous text, as well as the cultural knowledge of the general target audience. If the translator simply projects the cultural mindset of America into a Chinese translation, then the dubbed or subtitled versions will undoubtedly have a negative effect on the viewers, thus not only causing a cultural"shock", but also killing the intended effect of the original humor.In this chapter, we also summarize and illustrate five commonly used strategies of cultural adaptation and reconstruction when dealing with the culture-specific humor, such as explicitation, annotation, paraphrase, substitution and creative reconstruction of humorous dialogues. The discussion in this section is strongly supported by data analysis. With the data collected from the twenty randomly-chosen episodes of each sitcom, we try to examine how each strategy is applied differently in the dubbing and subtitling process, and what impact the frequency of usage may have on the humor transmission. The data analysis helps us to determine the proportion of culture-specific humor in a sitcom. It also sheds light on our understanding of the dynamic relationship between the following variables in the translation of sitcom humor: the frequency of each strategy, the mode of audiovisual translation, humor themes, the translator's competence and audience-oriented consciousness, the feasibility of humor reconstruction in the target text etc.Chapter Seven is the conclusion of the dissertation. It starts with a brief review of what we have studied so far and then reiterates its academic significance and breakthrough. At the end, it points out the area where further research may be carried out.
|
PDF Full Text Request