A Study On Subtitle Translation Of Verbal Humor In American TV Plays

Humor is something common and necessary in our daily life. Nowadays, American TV play online is a hot favorite prevailing over the entire world as it is densely characterized by its local color of American humor. Verbal humor is the most striking feature of American TV plays and the canned laughter marks the witty words in each episode. Subtitle translation, as a prevailing form of audiovisual translation now, is the principal form of introduction of American TV plays in China. Thanks to Chinese fansubbers' endeavors in subtitle translation, the target viewers are able to take as much delight as the source language viewers. The glamour of American humor has been deepened and enlarged in the form of subtitle translation of American TV plays.Subtitle translation distinguishes itself from other types of literary translation for four distinctive features although it belongs to the latter, i.e. diasemiotic, integrated, instantaneous and informal. Constrained by time and space, subtitle translation needs to use more than one channel. Subtitle translation is also a multiplex art of sound and image, which makes it a comprehensive activity. Generally speaking, subtitles appearing on the screen don't stay long. Thus irreversibility is the most striking feature of subtitle translation. In addition, the target viewers of subtitle translation are the mass public who watch TV plays for entertainment, so it's rather important to use simple and colloquial language.Moreover, subtitle translation of verbal humor not only functions as a communication medium of linguistic conversion, but also involves transmission of cultural information. Words with the same semantic meaning in different cultures constitute a culture default in humorous elements as a result of differences in terms of historical backgrounds, social systems, ethnic traditions, customary proverbs and slang, etc. In order to fulfill some cultural vacuums in subtitling, a subtitler has to adopt compensation or conversion strategy, to ensure that target viewers have a synchronized understanding of English speeches and plots. How to adequately transmit the cultural information embedded in the original humor is an unavoidable challenge to any subtitler at work.Traditional humor theories mainly probe into the nature of humor, among which, the three classical ones are:incongruity theory, superiority theory and relief theory (Morreall,1983:4). Nevertheless, traditional theories of humor chiefly explore a regular pattern of humor generation with a beginning of the nature of humor. Therefore, they lack a basis on systematic analysis of similarity of verbal humor in different texts. In view of the distinctive features and restrictions of subtitle translation, starting from the text features of verbal humor in American TV plays, this thesis probes into the issue of verbal humor translation in the light of General Theory of Verbal Humor (hereafter referred to as GTVH) and linear hierarchy pattern of six Knowledge Resources proposed by Salvatore Attardo.Through a comparative study on examples of subtitle translation, this thesis attempts to summarize some distinctive skills adopted by fansubbers and analyze their gains and loss in humor reproduction, appealing to the society and academia for more concern over the active online fansubbing.GTVH as a linguistic theory of humor can benefit humor translation by providing an analytic framework of six Knowledge Resources, namely, Language (LA), Narrative Strategy(NS), Target(TA), Situation(SI), Logical Mechanism(LM), and Script Opposition(SO).The hierarchy of the KRs is used to analyze the internal structure of verbal humor texts and their translation:"the degree of perceived difference between jokes increases linearly with the height of the Knowledge Resources in which the two jokes differ."(Attardo,2002:183) GTVH and six KRs can be used as a formal tool of judging how different or similar two humorous texts can be. Attardo's theory gives a fresh insight in comparative studies on English and Chinese verbal humor. Yet considering the fact that humor is culture-specific, it's obviously inadequate to formulate operational guidelines on how to maintain similarities in these KRs and humorous effects in another culture. This is also one of its limitations.