Translating humorous videos on social media: Meaning-making in a shared culture

This paper focuses on the practices by amateur subtitlers who translate and disseminate foreign humorous videos on social media, with particular attention on the meaning-making process involving raw material selection, subtitling, reception and interaction within the online community. Drawing on relevance theory, this paper proposes that meaning-making in social media environment is achieved by both subtitlers and viewers who jointly construct a mutual cognitive environment containing shared cultural information. To verify this hypothesis, it selects 10 pieces of humorous videos and collects the viewer comments from weibo to analyze how subtitlers manage to convey the humorous meaning and how viewers respond to the subtitled content and negotiate meaning to build a shared culture. Overall, this paper contributes to the emerging research focus on the participatory consumption and reception of translated audiovisual texts in the digital era.