Conveying Humour In Audiovisual Translation

Samuel Huntington (1993) put forward the theory of "Clash of Civilizations". Against the backdrop of globalization, China has been following the strategy of "opening-up" and "going global" in all-round ways in order to get to know other civilizations and to wind down cultural shocks in international communication.In the digital era, print media is giving way to screen media with the latter becoming a prominent vehicle for trans-cultural communication. More and more TV programmes and films, particularly those produced by the US and the UK, are being disseminated around the globe. Accordingly, that either dubbing or subtitling is properly done bears vital importance in this process.This thesis chooses humour translation as its point of entry. First, it starts with summarizing the characteristics of situation comedies and constraints for subtitling. Then it analyzes the norms of translation from the angle of descriptive translation study (DTS). In order to achieve the goal of sitcom audiovisual translation (AVT), which is to make the target language (TL) audience laugh and experience the same comedic effect as their source language (SL) counterpart, subtitlers could adopt several strategies to cope with translation problems both linguistic and extralinguistic. At last, the qualitative and quantitative study demonstrates the dominant position occupied by the Anglophone culture, as both Chinese and Spanish subtitlers appear prone to adopt source-oriented strategies. Due to the proximity between English and Spanish as well as the cultures they represent, Spanish translators have gone further in terms of maintaining the original flavor. In addition, the abundant use of Internet language in Chinese translation facilitates the conveying of humour.Chinese and Spanish are the most widely and commonly used languages in the world apart from English. Compared with previous study, the thesis selects subtitling examples not only in Chinese but in Spanish as well allowing subtitlers to learn from each other through comparison and introducing in a new dimension for AVT and international communication studies, so as to provide a more thorough and compelling argument, and from the angle of translation to look into the trans-cultural communication between the east and west, the Anglophone community and Hispanic world.