Understanding Humor in Drama Translation: With Focus on American Sitcom Modern Family

This paper concerns about the translation of humor in drama subtitles. The data is taken from American situational comedy Modern Family Season I, and reviewed how humors in the American sitcoms are appreciated by the Korean viewers in terms of comparing closed captioned English and Korean subtitles. It is true to humor that cultural understanding takes more important position than any other literary works. First the general concept of humor will be discussed, and the way how humor is translated will be briefly reviewed. And then the sitcom Modern Family Season I will be introduced and analyzed adopted from three types of humors of Raphaelson-West (1989)’s three types of jokes. In analyzing the corpus of the TV sitcoms, this paper uses a descriptive and analytic approach in which examples were collected, categorized and explained. Consequently, the findings shows that the linguistic humors are most challenging to translators than the general humors, and the cultural understanding is most required to make up the gap.