C-E Translation Of Humorous Movie Subtitles In The Light Of Relevance Theory

Chinese movies are an important part of Chinese culture and are receiving more and more international attention. One of the primary methods that Chinese movies are able to be shared with the world is Chinese to English subtitles. Thus、in order for the Chinese movie market to expand globally, the importance of Chinese to English subtitles cannot be underestimated.This paper, equipped with Relevance Theory, illustrates key concepts such as relevance, clue, processing effort, maximum relevance and optimal relevance. Then, it reviews subtitle translation features and technical constraints. The paper takes Feng Xiaogang’s comedy movies as an example. conducts analysis on humorous Chinese to English subtitle translations from phonetic, morpheme, lexical, and rhetoric levels, and suggests some revised translations under the guidance of Relevance Theory. The author offers three strategies in humorous Chinese to English subtitle translation:to keep source language clues, to maintain the gap between maximum relevance and optimal relevance, and to maintain a degree of difficulty of the target audience’s processing effort. In this way, humor will be preserved as much as possible in the target language. In the end, the author designs a questionnaire and conducts a survey in the target audience to test the result of applying the strategies.The paper is divided into seven chapters. Chapter one is the introduction with a background of the research, significance and method. Chapter two is literature review on Relevance Theory and subtitle translation studies. Chapter three is on Relevance Theory with a thorough elaboration on Relevance Translation Theory. Chapter four is on the features, technical constraints, and standardization of subtitle translation. Chapter five analyzes examples from Feng’s comedy movies under the guidance of Relevance Theory. Chapter six sums up the previous analysis, offers three translation strategies and provides a survey result on subtitle translation quality for the target audience. Chapter seven contains the conclusion. research constraints, and an outlook on the application of Relevance Theory to subtitle translation.