Beyond Translation Accuracy: Audience Reception of Humor Loss in Audiovisual Humor Translation ——Evidence From Mo Lei Tau Humor in Chinese Animation

Abstract

Audiovisual humor translation involves challenges beyond linguistic transfer because humor appreciation depends not only on semantic accuracy but also on the preservation of culturally, pragmatically, and contextually embedded meanings. Although previous studies have extensively examined translation strategies for humor, less attention has been paid to how audiences perceive humor loss resulting from translation errors. This study investigates audience reception of translated humor in Scissor Seven (SS), a Chinese animated series featuring Mo Lei Tau (MLT) humor, a culturally embedded comedic style characterized by linguistic playfulness, absurdity, and incongruity.

Adopting a qualitative audience reception approach, this study first identified instances of humor translation errors from the Chinese source texts and English subtitles based on Nord’s (1997) functionalist error typology. These examples were then used as stimuli in semi-structured interviews with twenty bilingual participants. The interview data were analyzed using thematic analysis to explore audience perceptions of humorous effects, multimodal compensation, and translation acceptability.

The findings reveal that participants perceived varying degrees of humor loss across the four selected clips. Their evaluations concerned semantic clarity, cultural references, tone, and wordplay. Some participants found the linguistic-error clip unexpectedly humorous despite its lexical mistranslation. Participants reported partial compensation from visual and auditory cues, with its perceived effectiveness varying across cases. Acceptability was limited but varied, with some participants tolerating humor loss in view of translation difficulties and subtitle constraints. These findings describe reception tendencies associated with the selected cases rather than generalized patterns of the four error categories. This study highlights the importance of audience-oriented evaluation in audiovisual humor translation and suggests that translation adequacy should be assessed not only through textual correspondence but also through perceived humorous effects among target audiences.