The C-E Translation Of Humorous Discourse

In an era of cross-cultural communication, the film industry achieves prosperous development, which has made China bring in a large number of western films, meanwhile many local films with Chinese elements are introduced abroad as well. Since the film was born, only more than hundreds of Chinese films have arisen in commercial projection area at abroad, among which mainly focus on the types of history, action and fantasy, rarely to comedy. Thus, it is necessary to do a research on the subtitle translation of Chinese comedy, which is conducive to the output of Chinese comedy and spread the Chinese humor.The thesis uses the Lost in Thailand as a case study, and adopted Reader-response theory as its theoretical framework. And four research questions are proposed:(1) How is the Chinese humorous discourse reflected in the film? (2) What’s the target audience’s response to Chinese humorous discourse? (3) What kind of translation strategies should be adopted? (4) What reasons make the loss of Chinese humorous discourse?Through the classification of humorous discourse in the film and analysis of the target audience’s response, the conclusions are:(1) The classification of humor is linguistic humor, cultural humor and universal humor, which are achieved by the skillful use of rhetorical devices, the variety and innovation of language and the deviation of logic respectively. (2) The universal humor is most easily accepted by TL audience, then the linguistic humor and last is cultural humor. (3) Literal translation can achieve the translation of universal humor. On the basis of that, omission and annotation is needed. Linguistic humor is realized through literal translation, free translation and addition. Cultural humor is achieved through idiomatic translation and free translation.(4) Due to difference of phonetic and linguistic features and cultural background, the Chinese humorous effect is often lost and difficult to translate.