Abstract
Humour is bounded by culture or language, and it involves shared knowledge and history between the sender and the receiver, which could make humour subtitling even more complicated. This study aimed at exploring the subtitling strategies used in fansub in the television series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, as well as the humour elements of source and target text in each humour, and the translation errors made in English to Chinese fansub. Humour instances were identified and analysed, and the subtitling strategies used by fans were explained. The findings showed the inconsistent quality of fansub could be due to linguistic and technical constraints, insufficient cultural knowledge of the source and target cultures, and deviations from translation norms, resulting in linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and text-specific translation errors. The study could have some theoretical and practical implications for translators, subtitlers, and trainers.
Highlights
Humour is anything that makes people laugh or is amusing, or the capacity to recognise what is funny about a situation or a person
Transcription and dislocation were not found in the fansub translation of The Marvelous Mrs Maisel
The fansub tended to transfer the source text (ST) to the TT literally, with the use of paraphrasing, the unnaturalness of the TT could be observed because the TT was not adapted to the target language (TL) norms
Summary
Humour is anything that makes people laugh or is amusing, or the capacity to recognise what is funny about a situation or a person. Humour in Chinese constitutes an event that triggers a thoughtful smile or smile resulting from the meeting of hearts (LIN, 1936). Owing to the proliferation of both traditional (TV, cinema) and on-demand streaming platforms, humour is becoming increasingly internationalized within the multifaceted entertainment mediascape (DORE, 2019). Everyone shares the ability to appreciate and enjoy humour, each culture perceives what constitutes humour differently, that is what is entertaining in one culture can be tiresome or even offensive in other cultures. One must be aware of the cultural differences, especially the way humour is assumed and used, in order to communicate with those who come from various backgrounds appropriately (AMINI; IBRAHIM-GONZÁLEZ; AYOB, 2013)
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