An empirical study on audience perception of interlingual subtitles in stand-up comedy shows

Abstract

In recent years, the rising popularity of subscription video on demand (SVOD) services like Netflix has transformed stand-up comedy into a globally available audiovisual product, thus calling for audiovisual translation (AVT) to cater to an increasingly diverse and international audience. While the AVT of humour has been widely studied, research on stand-up comedy as an audiovisual product is largely unheard of. This Singapore-based study seeks to explore the AVT of English-language stand-up comedy shows on Netflix by adopting the empirical approach of audience reception research. Conducted across two phases, the study began with an online survey to explore audience practice of watching stand-up comedy shows, with a focus on the use of subtitles. Following, in Phase Two of the study, 10 participants from the pool of survey respondents were asked to view excerpts of Chinese subtitled stand-up comedy specials on Netflix, answer an open-ended questionnaire and sit for a brief interview. The participants’ humour comprehension and viewing preferences were assessed in the process. Analysis showed that the comprehension of stand-up comedy humour is largely contingent upon the viewers’ cultural background knowledge. A lack of such knowledge was often not adequately made up for with the translation in the Chinese subtitles. It was also found that bilingual viewers proficient in both source and target languages generally prefer using intralingual subtitles in the source language (in this case, English subtitles) when watching stand-up comedy shows.