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Abstract

With the trend of globalization, an increasing number of foreign films and TV programs are introduced into China, through the window of which we are confronted by an alien culture. As a representative of situation comedy, Friends has attracted a lot of attention these years. It is famous mostly for its ingenious humors and the peculiar American culture immersed in it. While humor in most cases brings about problems attached to the culture which it is rooted in and since humor in films and TV programs plays an important role in conveying the culture messages and presents different modes of thinking, its translation is deemed as a great challenge to all translators.A number of previous studies have dealt with humor translation in Friends from various perspectives ever since its introduction into China. However, this paper presents another approach to a systematic investigation into humor. In the analysis of humor translation schema theory is feasibly employed, an approach few attempts have ever been made to resort to.The notion of schema can be traced back to the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1781), who speaks of“innate structures which organize our world.”However, F. C. Bartlett (1932), the British psychologist, is commonly acknowledged as the first to establish schema theory when he explains how people remember stories in his work Remembering. Ever since then, it has gone through linguistics, anthropology, psychology and artificial intelligence, and has been widely used in many fields.Inspired by this, this thesis attempts to explore, through a descriptive study, the problems connected to humor translation in Friends and tries to identify some of the factors influencing the translator’s decision-making process in translating subtitles from a schematic perspective, which gives some insight into translation in the audiovisual medium. Great importance is attached to the rendering of humorous effect through the application of schema theory. Certain fragments are taken and catagorized and various techniques employed are induced and analyzed, leading to the conclusion that the translator should always take the activation of relevant schemata into consideration in the translating process.

A Schematic Approach to Humor Translation in Friends

Abstract

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