Rafa Rejeibi
A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Explicating Humour in Subtitling Sitcoms from English to Arabic
Rejeibi, Rafa
Authors
Contributors
PROF Wen-Chin Ouyang wo@soas.ac.uk
Supervisor
DR Christopher Lucas cl39@soas.ac.uk
Supervisor
Abstract
In the domain of audiovisual translation (AVT), rendering humour is difficult due to the linguistic intricacy involved and the technical limitations of the medium. Furthermore, it is crucial in humour transfer to represent the original discourse's conceptual and contextual entities within the target text (TT). The American Sitcom How I met Your Mother (HIMYM), investigated in this study, is found to widely employ the strategy of explicitation (a form of expansion) in subtitling from English to Arabic, which is contrary to subtitling norms governed by time and space constraints. This research aims to analyse products of the subtitling of humour from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective in a variety of categories of Netflix translation (wordplay and pun, allusions and idiomatic expressions, visual communication, stereotypes, cultural lacunas, proprialisation and appellativization as sources of humour and language-based humour). This study uses a combined model to acquire insights from three theoretical perspectives: the relevance-theoretic classification of joke types (Yus, 2008); humour rendering tendencies classified according to the humour rendering framework of Mateo (1995); and explicitation as a macro-strategy in translation comprising of micro-strategies used to disambiguate utterances and direct the viewer's attention in subtitling. Data analysis of the data shows a high percentage of explicitation strategies manifested in micro-strategies of addition, substitution, specification, expansion and explanation, and pragmatic explicatures of disambiguation, reference assignment, logical form, enrichment and contextual assumptions. Findings show that the less incongruity is found in the source text (ST) joke, the fewer explicitation strategies are applied. From a relevance-theoretic standpoint, the humorous effect increases when receivers discover another underlying meaning to find congruence beyond the explicit meaning. Providing the underlying meaning too soon on the surface of an utterance does not preserve the inferential procedures that allow for the derivation of comic effects.
Citation
Rejeibi, R. A Relevance Theoretic Approach to Explicating Humour in Subtitling Sitcoms from English to Arabic. (Thesis). SOAS University of London
Thesis Type | Thesis |
---|---|
Deposit Date | Mar 8, 2023 |
Publicly Available Date | Mar 8, 2023 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.25501/SOAS.00039086 |
Additional Information | Number of Pages : 230 |
Award Date | Jan 1, 2023 |
Files
Ragebi_2023.pdf
(3.1 Mb)
PDF
Licence
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Publisher Licence URL
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
You might also like
Hichem Djaït on the Quran as a source for early Islamic history
(2023)
Book Chapter
Downloadable Citations
About SOAS Research Online
Administrator e-mail: outputs@soas.ac.uk
This application uses the following open-source libraries:
SheetJS Community Edition
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
PDF.js
Apache License Version 2.0 (http://www.apache.org/licenses/)
Font Awesome
SIL OFL 1.1 (http://scripts.sil.org/OFL)
MIT License (http://opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html)
CC BY 3.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)
Powered by Worktribe © 2025
Advanced Search