Subtitling Humor In Friends

Due to its happening in medium-specific environment, subtitling—a special mode different from traditional translation activities— has its own constraints, mainly spatial, temporal ones and the synchronization of sound and subtitles. The paper has investigated the subtitling of humor in Friends featuring humorous language.To better understand the internal structure of humorous texts, General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH) put forward by Attardo is employed. It is acknowledged as one of the most convincing humor theories from linguistic point of view. It consists of six Knowledge Resources (KR) which have been arranged hierarchically, i.e. Script Opposition (SO), Logical Mechanism (LM), Situation (SI), Target (TA), Narrative Strategy (NS), and Language (LA), claiming that SO is the most abstract one and each joke should have a SO. The other important contribution of GTVH is that it can be used as a formal tool to compare two jokes both intralingually and interlingually. It is used here to analyze the original humorous text and evaluate its similarities with the translation.According to Relevance Theory (RT), subtitling involves two rounds of ostensive-inferential processes and subtitles are written forms which interpretively resemble the original utterances, both in terms of the content and the relevance degree.By focusing on redundant information in original humorous utterances, cultural elements embedded and puns, the paper has observed that the translator should provide the most relevant information to the target audience through justifiable omissions and when their cognitive environment is not adequate enough through semantic translation plus there is little chance to make any annotation, the translator is allowed to make adjustments at different levels so that the target audience can also yield extra contextual effect with more processingeffort or the relevance degree of the translation to the target audience resembles that of the original utterances to the original audience.