ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces how to exploit the corpus methodology to enquire into issues about humour in audiovisual translation (AVT) studies. To this end, a corpus has been constructed to investigate the strategies used by professional subtitlers to render a variety of English humorous expressions in the BBC sitcom The Office (Gervais and Merchant 2001–2003), into in Traditional Chinese subtitles. This chapter first presents an overview of corpus linguistics, establishes a framework based on relevance theory that is compatible with frame theory, and then provides the concrete process of building a corpus containing spoken English, written Chinese and annotations for the examination of the relationship between subtitling strategies and different types of humour. This study demonstrates the tremendous potential of the corpus methodology to be a powerful instrument in exploring specialised issues in AVT studies.