Translation Of Verbal Humor In Subtitles From The Perspective Of Presupposition

This thesis mainly studies humor translation from the perspective ofpresupposition. Presupposition theory includes semantic presupposition and pragmaticpresupposition; the former is generated by the semantic features of the linguistic items,such as lexical items and all kinds of other syntactic structures; and the latter resortsto notions of variability of use in context. Presupposition theory provides an analytictool and is proved useful in humor-generation.The data is collected from the subtitle of popular American sitcom Friends and itsChinese translation, which possesses large quantities of well-written humor. Based onpresupposition theory, fifty eight humorous examples are examined closely underapproaches of both semantic and pragmatic presupposition to display howpresupposition elicits various kinds of incongruities and how its humorous effect istransferred to its target viewers.The author first explores the production of humorous conversations in Friendsfrom the perspective of presupposition so as to investigate the application of theory ofpresupposition in humor and find out how presupposition elicits humor. Then thispresupposition-triggered humor would be analyzed in translation field by comparingthe two Chinese versions to see whether these presuppositions are conveyed in targetlanguage and how. On the one hand, it is expected to bear out the validity ofpresupposition as one of humor generative mechanism, and on the other hand, to findout the feasible translation methods to realize the humorous effect in translatinghumor generated by presupposition.