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Abstract As a vital part of translation studies, humour has drawn scholarly attention for decades, with classifications that range from Zabalbeascoa’s (The Translator 2(2):235–257, 1996) six types of jokes to Chiaro and Piferi’s (It’s green! It’s cool! It’s Shrek! Italian children, laughter and subtitles. In: Di Giovanni E, Elefante C, Pederzoli R (eds) Écrire Et Traduire Pour Les Enfants—writing and translating for children. Peter Lang, Brussels, 2010, p. 285) “Verbally Expressed Humour”. However, they are mainly related to printed pages, theatre, and film. Little research touches on the new media, which significantly impacts how information is produced and disseminated and how consumers react to and engage with these trendy platforms (Díaz-Cintas, Remael. Audiovisual translation: subtitling. Routledge, London and New York, 2021, p. 1). This significant gap in the video-sharing platforms on humour translation is the focus of this paper which intends to fill. This paper explores how humour is created and reconstructed in the dominant and constantly evolving new media era. Driven by the niche of an interdisciplinary study concerning humour and creative subtitles, the present research conducts a linguistic and semiotic analysis of humorous discourses and emojis in the Chinese contexts of the short video platform Little Red Book and the online teaching platform Rain Classroom. As the study implies, humour can be strengthened through diverse semiotic possibilities to provide better viewing experiences that bring about entertaining and educational outcomes.

Abstract The paper sets out to devise an online subtitling course emphasising the human nature of translation. To gain a deeper understanding of audience behaviours and attitudes towards the consumption of subtitles, the article utilises questionnaires and case studies. Results are used to devise a learner-customised and technology-assisted online course about subtitling. The case studies that inspire the course content and design include the short-video platform Douyin (the Chinese equivalent of TikTok) and the comparison of two MOOCs, Working with Translation: Theories and Practice and Consecutive Interpreting. In summary, the course design for teaching subtitling will be based on the findings of the research questions and elastically adapted to the syllabus. We put forward our course with an emphasis on the practicality of producing subtitles in light of the technological acceleration in the marketplace and, more importantly, the humanistic nature of translation.

Abstract The paper aims to investigate how a Chinese heroic legend was reconfigured for Western viewers through the English-dubbed versions of a case-study film, Monkey King: Hero is Back (2015). The ultimate goal of the study is to shed new light on how dubbing practice may better cater to Western target audiences. Based on two macrolevel translation theories, three translation models, and the two microlevel translation strategies, this paper discusses the most commonly used film translation strategies for English dubbing in the case-study film and their implications for the effectiveness of translation. The findings suggest that driven by the target-audience orientation, English-dubbing strategies often use standard language constrained by linguistic and cultural disparities as opposed to dynamic, adaptive Chinese dubbing.