Transference Of Humor In Subtitling Of TED Talks From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Presupposition

TED Conference (abbreviation for Technology, Entertainment and Design) was co-founded byRichard Weinman and Harry Marx in1984. Having devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading”, it invites leadersof various fields around the world to give speech and share their most enthusiastic career. Since theestablishment of its official website in2002, TED Conference has released the HD video of each talk forfree. TED Talks has become more and more popular among many English learners and Englishprofessionals in China, which also draws much attention of many volunteers to its translation. Althoughtranslators and researchers have been focusing on subtitling recently and explored specific features andstrategies of this type of translation, there have been few of them coming up with the translation strategiesfrom the perspective of pragmatic presupposition to guide the humor translation in subtitling of speeches.The author holds that subtitling of TED Talks and translation of this kind should be given enough attention.Since pragmatics was applied in translation studies, the relationship between presupposition andtranslation have been studied by many researchers. Pragmatic presupposition is an integration of the socialexperiences of a certain community, which is the social awareness of a nation and is determined by itssocial culture, namely, stereotyped thinking and behavioral patterns. In cross-cultural communication,cultural differences impose great pressure on target audience. Thus, the translator should be fully aware ofthe culture-loaded pragmatic presuppositions.As the speakers in TED Talks come from all over the world, their speeches are full of native culturalcolors. The author thinks that it is culture that nurtures humor and humor is realized through pragmaticpresuppositions to a great extent, especially, cultural presuppositions. Therefore, how to transfer thecultural connotation of the source text is of great significance to realize the humorous effect in thetranslation process. This thesis tries to carry out an analysis of the transference of humor in subtitling ofTED Talks from the perspective of pragmatic presupposition. This paper holds that humor in TED Talks canbe classified into two types: humor by general presupposition and humor by cultural presupposition. As thefirst type of pragmatic presupposition is shared by most common languages or related to universal human mental and psychological reactions, humor by this kind of presupposition can be literally translated tomaintain the humorous effect. However, most pragmatic presuppositions, namely, cultural presuppositions,cannot be understood and accepted by target audience because of its close relationship with a certainsociety or culture. It has been found that most of the cultural presuppositions have been realized by thetranslators who adopted appropriate strategies while there still has been humor killed due to the loss ofcultural presuppositions by analyzing the translations of humor in TED Talks according to the principles ofpragmatic translation.It is concluded that in the process of humor translation, the translator should take pragmaticequivalence as a general principle, make the target audience oriented and transfer the pragmatic meaningand pragmatic force of the original. To guarantee the success of the communication, the translator must atfirst recognize the humor, find the elements which influence the target audience’ reception of humor andthen appropriately transfer the writer/speaker’s intended meaning and expected effect based on targetaudience’ cultural and cognitive expectations.