A Study Of The Humorous Subtitling Translation Of The American Sitcom Friends In The Light Of Skopostheory

This paper is a study of the translation of the American sitcom Friends in the light of Skopostheory.For centuries, translation theory and practice cannot get rid of the dominant idea of"faithfulness"or"equivalence". The translator has always been wandering about the dilemma between metaphrase and free translation and tried in vain to meet both sides.Skopostheory, born in the mid-to-late 1970s, a theoretical revolution in contemporary translation studies, regards translation action as a purposeful intercultural action. The Skopostheory states that translation actions all have specific purposes, which determine the whole process of translation. The Skopostheory concentrates on the Skopos rule, Coherence rule and Fidelity rule with the Skopos rule predominating. Skopostheory provides a unique criterion for the assessment of the translation adequacy, which refers to the qualities of a Target Text with regard to the translation brief.Based on Skopostheory, a descriptive-explanatory method along with a case study is adopted in this research. The history of the study of Skopostheory is reviewed firstly, from which the aspects, the three key rules and its merits and demerits are all revealed. After a brief historical overview of how skopos-oriented concepts come into being, the study of the humors in Source Text and Target Text can give us the result is that the humors in Target Text is similar to the Source Text both in language features and rhetorical devices. Then the author makes a comparison of the content between the Source Text and Target Text under the rules of Skopostheory: Skopos rule, Coherence rule, Fidelity rule.From the comparison, the author finds out that the skopos of TT is similar to the skopos of ST that's why the TT is similar to the ST both in the language and figurative devices. The TT does well in coherence rule but makes some mistakes in fidelity rule. Considering that the skopos of TT is to introduce this sitcom to Chinese audience, and make the sitcom become a useful English material for the English learners, this version of translation of Friends can be believed as an adequate one for it has achieved its skopos.