The Translation Of Humor In Films And TV Dramas

This thesis explores how humor in films and TV dramas can overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers when they are translated into other languages. It also aims at finding whether the dubbed or subtitled films and TV dramas can successfully elicit laughter from the target language audience, who speak a different language and are not well acquainted with the source language culture.This thesis consists of seven Chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction, which covers the objectives, focus, and methodology of the study.Chapter Two reviews relevant literature in the field of audiovisual translation and humor translation.Chapter Three first defines audiovisual translation and then introduces the constraints of audiovisual translation and two primary translation modes of films and TV dramas, i.e. dubbing and subtitling.Chapter Four distinguishes the humor in films and TV dramas into visual humor and audio humor, and then illustrates their features in detail respectively.Chapter Five analyzes three inter-linked factors that influence the cognition of humor, and illustrates the untranslatability and the translatability of verbal humor.Chapter Six is the emphasis of this thesis, where the translation strategies of wordplay humor and culture-specific humor in films and TV dramas are thoroughly examined respectively by plenty of examples.Chapter Seven is the conclusion which summarizes the findings of this research.