Strategies For Translating Verbal Humour In Subtitles In If You Are The One From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

The dating reality show Fei Cheng Wu Rao gained immense popularity in Australia through English subtitling.Humour,a crucial element of the show,posed great difficulties to translation.By examining the show’s subtitle translation,the thesis explores the types and frequency of verbal humour in the source text（ST）and their translation strategies observed in the target text（TT）,inquires into the effectiveness of the strategies through the Relevance Theory,and hopes to provide lessons for similar programmes.Eleven episodes with English subtitles were examined.Forty-eight instances of verbal humour of research significance are identified via the six parameters of the General Theory of Verbal Humour（GTVH）.Through a quantitative analysis and a descriptive textual analysis with the Relevance Theory,the thesis draws the following conclusions:1)Verbal humour in Fei Cheng Wu Rao may be divided into linguistic jokes,cultural jokes,and parody with reference to Raphaelson-West（1989）.Cultural jokes outnumber the other two with many instances being trendy expressions.Most linguistic jokes are phonetically-based because the ST is in an audio form,and mishearing and spoonerisms are common because conversations are spontaneous;2)Four translation strategies can be adopted for linguistic jokes:a)reduplicating the logic of humour,b)adapting the logic of humour,c)explaining the humour,and d)omitting humour.Phonetically-based humour was adapted to morphologically-based ones because the TT is presented visually.For cultural jokes,strategies emphasize on explaining cultural elements and amplifying implicature,including absolute generalization,linguistic translation,intratextual gloss,and deletion（based on Aixela’s（1996）translation strategies for culture-specific items）.No insertion of target-culture references was found to translate cultural jokes.Parodies were translated depending on specific cases.All translations were highly readable and concise.3)A relevance-theoretic analysis of the strategies concluded that for linguistic jokes,reduplicating the logic of humour is the most effective.For cultural jokes,the effectiveness of strategies relies on the balance of contextual efects and processing efforts.