Translating humour using subtitles(Chinese to English)

Peng, Yu 2020. Translating humour using subtitles(Chinese to English). PhD Thesis, Cardiff University. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the way in which humour in Chinese comedies is transferred forEnglish-speaking audiences. It employs multimodality as a concept to underline that to privilege only linguistic approaches to subtitling is to ignore the way in which verbal and non-verbal modes interplay in the generation of humour. The corpus under examination contains four Chinese comedies from different genres: the romantic comedyIf You Are the One(2008), the chick flick Finding Mr. Right(2013), the black comedy Let the Bullets Fly(2011), and the martial arts comedy Monster Hunt(2015). These are used as case studies to investigate the linguistic and cultural barriers inherent in the subtitling of Chinese humour into English. This thesis analyses different types of humour in the original Chinese and their transposition into English subtitles through the prism of multimodality to underline the complex interaction of different semiotic modes in the generation of laughter. This thesis demonstrates that verbally expressed humour and cultural humour tend to travel badly by comparison with non-verbal modes. Non-verbal modes, to a certain degree, however, can compensate for the loss of linguistic or cultural humour. Moreover, on the basis of the case studies of these four Chinese comedies, this thesis works to offer a more precise classification of audiovisual humour. This work highlights that the analysis of humour in this context cannot be limited to linguistic evaluations of subtitles like those in the case studies. Films are multimodal texts, and subtitling humour is a multimodal activity in which verbal and non-verbal modes combine to trigger comic effects. Multimodality is key to understanding the translation strategies which enable the transposition of humour from Chinese into English. This study unpicks the complex ways in which Chinese humour and culture are rendered for English-speaking audiences and argues powerfully that multimodality is a key framework for further studies of subtitling.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Modern Languages
Subjects:	P Language and Literature > PB Modern European Languages P Language and Literature > PI Oriental languages and literatures
Language other than English:	Chinese
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	4 June 2021
Date of Acceptance:	4 June 2021
Last Modified:	04 Jun 2022 01:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/141717

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