A Study Of Sitcom Subtitling With The Translation Of Friends As An Example

As more and more foreign movies, especially English movies, enter China, movie translation is becoming a popular field. Friends, a famous American sitcom series, is warmly received by many people in China. However, its translation is by no means an easy job with the huge difference between the source and target languages and cultures. Currently there are two complete Chinese subtitle versions available on the Internet.In this paper, the author evaluates the translations from a functional point of view. The three rules of Skopos Theory, namely the top ranking skopos rule, the second ranking coherence rule and the third ranking fidelity rule are applied to define the desired effect of the Chinese subtitles of Friends. Then the author describes how Chinese translators deal with the difficulties in the translation of the series, for instance, humor and long sentences.After matching the effect of the Chinese subtitles against the desired effect, the author reaches the conclusion that in most cases the Chinese translators adopt literal translation to deal with the difficulties in translation, and it works for the translation of long sentences, universal humor, most rhetorical humor and some cultural humor. In the translation of puns, homophones and some cultural humor when literal translation does not work, the translators do not always come up with effective strategies. The failure in translation is the result of the limitations on their knowledge, their inaccurate prediction of the target viewers'knowledge and translators'putting the subordinate rules over the top ranking rule.