On Humor Subtitle Translation In Desperate Housewives From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

Translating plays a vital role in cross-cultural communication. With globalization of the world economy and deepening cultural communication among different countries, we have more and more opportunities to share resources with each other. Desperate Housewives is a TV series produced by American ABC TV station, which choose American middle class life as the theme of the play. The popularity of the play makes us believe that a good product may cross different culture and language.However, audiovisual products are filled with specific social and cultural factors, as the carrier of a particular nation’s social life and social ideology and become a part of people’s daily life. In this case, the translation work is particularly important. However, compared with the western scholars, the subtitle translation studies of domestic scholars are still not deep and wide enough. In the translation strategies and translation principles, there is no consensus, that is to say the research of translation standards do not have common sense. Humor translation is a relatively special part in subtitles translation. Differ to the translating of other literary text, translating of verbal humor lines is a new challenge for the translator since the humorous effect in translation should be preserved. But in translating practice, it is quite difficult to retain the humorous effect in translated text due to different language features and cultures, at least not in the same degree of enjoyment. Nida puts forward a concept "reader’s response" in his translation research. From his viewpoint, translation version can be the one of functional equivalence, providing that the target reader respond to the translated text equals to the original reader does to the source text. The concept happens to correspond with the purpose of humor subtitle translation, which is to make the foreign audience comprehend the plot of audiovisual products and have the same enjoyment as the original audience. In this sense, Nida’s functional equivalence theory provides scientific guidance for humor subtitle translation in Desperate Housewives.This thesis explores the humor subtitle translation from the perspective of functional equivalence theory. It consists of five chapters. The main contents are as follows:Chapter One is introduction, which states the research background and the purpose of this study.Chapter Two mainly deals with previous studies on humor subtitle translation and functional equivalence theory at home and abroad.Chapter Three gives a brief introduction of humor subtitle translation. It states the definition and features of humor translation and subtitling. Chapter Four serves as a theoretical framework for this paper. It is an overview of functional equivalence theory.Chapter Five is the case study of humorous subtitle translation in Desperate Housewives. The author evaluates and analyzes the translation of verbal humor in Desperate Housewives from the perspective of functional equivalence. In this chapter, this thesis attempts to divide humor into several types and each type of humor translation will be discussed with specific cases.The last part is conclusion, which summarizes the preceding research, points out the direction of sitcom translation and lays the ground foundation for future study.