How humour travels in the new and dynamic mediascape: a case study of a short video platform, Little Red Book, and an online teaching platform, Rain Classroom

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.