Explicitation In Translating American TV Play Subtitles Into Chinese-A Case Study Of Desperate Housewives From Perspective Of Relevance Theroy

American TV plays enjoy high visibility and popularity among Chinese youth today. They entertain us and play a vital channel for us to learn American English and to get to know American culture and society. Due to inadequate English competency, most viewers have to rely on subtitle translation to get full comprehension when watching American TV plays. Life tempo allows not dubbing, which takes such a long time; high-literacy viewers hope to use TV plays to help strengthen listening and speaking. Subtitle translation thus takes over dubbing to be a highly efficient way to realize both aims. Owing to its characteristics, subtitle translation tends to be demanding and translation practice should be carried under the guidance of specific principles. Due to discrepant cultures and languages, one hundred per cent of faithful delivering is doomed to be impossible. Translators should, catering to the needs of specific receivers, adopt suitable strategies in subtitles translation. This thesis, pursuing a pragmatic view based on the relevance theory of translation by Sperber and Wilson and the relevance theory of translation by Gutt, proposes and justifies the strategy of explicitation in subtitle translation, in order to provide a brand new angle of view for further research and suggest principles for translation practice.Starting from literature review of relevance theory, relevance theory of translation, explicitation and subtitle translation, the thesis launches a case study of subtitle translation of Desperate Housewives in the way of explicitation. The translated Chinese subtitles are collected from the translated TV plays produced by an Internet American TV plays translation group. Examples are quoted as classified according to different occasions. In the play translated Chinese subtitles explicitate those implicit information of which literal rendering cannot be fully comprehended by Chinese audience, provide optimal relevance, produce contextual effect and thus maximize the processing effort by the target audience and guarantee full comprehension of the plot.This thesis aims to provide a new channel to study subtitle translation and translation practice and a practical principle to guarantee the best and effective delivering of TV plays to the audience.