Linguistic Duels in the Courtroom: Subtitling Stephen Chow’s Verbal Humour in Hail the Judge

Humor translation is difficult, and with the temporal and spatial constraints of subtitling, one of the major forms of audiovisual translaiton, the chance of success for the subtitler is even slimmer. In this paper, I attempt to discuss the subtitling of verbal humor in Hail the Judge (1994), one of Stephen Chow’s courtroom comedies with particular reference to the linguistic duels between the junior local Judge Pao Lung Sing and his rival sly lawyer Fong Tong Kan in the film. Two humorous scenes in Hail the Judge are discuss to investigate if the linguistic strategies fit in with the script opposition (SO) concept of General Theory of Verbal Humour (GTVH), which was developed by Victor Raskin and Salvatore Attardo. Lastly, we look at the English subtitles and evaluate the success of this audiovisual translation task.