Applying Relevance Theory and Multimodal Transcription to the Interlingual Subtitling of Politeness and Humour in the English-Chinese Language Pair

: Hotel Babylon as a Case Study

Abstract

With the development of technology, audiovisual programmes have become increasingly popular around the world. At the same time, with the help of subtitles, language audiovisual programmes can be watched by foreign audiences who have no understanding of the language in which the film was originally made. Developments in Audiovisual Translation have attracted attention from researchers in this field. However, this thesis focuses on areas that have not been explored in depth: the transfer of politeness and humour in interlingual subtitling, in programmes translated from English into Chinese. Politeness and humour are two main elements which are systematically used to maintain relationships in people’s conversation in everyday social settings. In audiovisual programmes, these two elements are also used for similar purposes during the conversations among characters. This research investigates the pragmatic use of politeness and humour in the subtitle translation from English to Chinese of the British television drama Hotel Babylon (Riley 2006), which has been chosen as a case study. The research uses a combination of Relevance Theory and Multimodal Transcription in the analysis of pragmatic translation of politeness and humour. In audiovisual programmes, a large number of multimodal elements are used to provide various stimuli to their audiences to enable them to infer information while they rewatching these programmes. At the same time, these multimodal elements and verbal elements used during the conversation interact with and affect each other in the process of offering information in audio visual programmes. Since the British and Chinese cultures are so different, the translation of subtitles could be seen as inter lingual communication according to Relevance Theory. Multimodal Transcription can be used to represent the source language text, target language text and various multimodal elements in a systematic way. Through close and methodical examination of a large number of examples of the translation into Chinese of politeness and humour taken from all episodes of Season 1 of Hotel Babylon (Riley2006), this thesis concludes that a solid understanding of the multimodal environment in which the dialogue takes place is essential for achieving interpretive resemblance between the source and target texts. The thesis also contends that multimodal analysis of this type should be used as much as possible in the professional practice of subtitling especially when the cultural distance separating source and target cultures is considerable. Equipped with multimodal analysis skills, translators can unravel the complicated relationship which exists between verbal and multimodal elements in both source language text and target language text and are thus better placed to achieve the maximum contextual effect, while requiring the least processing effort from their target language audiences according to their cognitive context.

Date of Award	21 Dec 2021
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Roehampton
Supervisor	Dionysios Kapsaskis (Director of Studies) & Lucile Desblache (Co-Supervisor)