On Interlingual Subtitling Of The Sitcom Friends From The Persective Of Memetics

The accelerating trend towards globalization facilitating the intercultural communication gradually, audiovisual productions have played an increasingly significant role in cultural exchanges amongst different countries. More and more people in China begin to favor foreign audiovisual works, among which the American sitcom is one of the most popular forms. It is beyond doubt that interlingual subtitling serves a crucial role in reducing the barriers of language and culture for the audience's understanding of the productions. Therefore, the study of interlingual subtitling has been on the agenda and become a rising subject in translation field. The quality of interlingual subtitling affects target audience's acceptance of the original works and their spreading range. However, the domestic translation field has paid inadequate attention to this issue and the few researches are mostly some summaries of personal experience, lacking in interdisciplinary consciousness and the guidance of new theories.Memetics is a newly-developed theory about the law of cultural evolution which originates from Darwin's theory of evolution. It has attracted many researchers from various fields because of its powerful appeal since its coming into being. Meme is a unit of cultural evolution or a replicator of information with the three main features of longevity, fecundity and copying-fidelity. It is undeniable that interlingual subtitling is an interlingual and intercultural activity at bottom and subtitles can be regarded as a kind of meme in essence.This thesis conducts a qualitative study on interlingual subtitling from the perspective of memetics and selects the phenomenally popular American sitcom Friends as a case study. It adopts a descriptive-contrastive methodology for the most part of the data analysis, focusing on the interlingual subtitling of the humors. The paper begins by reviewing of interlingual subtitling and the theory of memetics systematically. Then it draws an analogy between the process of interlingual subtitling and the four fundamental stages of meme replication and constructed a memetic model of interlingual subtitling to verify the feasibility of applying memetics to interlingual subtitling. Next, a large number of instances are selected to analyze the replication process of subtitle meme, in which the selection criteria for memes play a decisive role. Subsequently, the main approaches to successful memes are proposed and the cultural orientation of interlingual subtitling is suggested. Finally, a brief conclusion is drawn to summarize the findings and limitations of the research and to offer some suggestions for future studies. The most significant innovation of this paper consists in its integration between the rising theory of memetics and interlingual subtitling and in its forward-looking researches, which possesses keen interdisciplinary consciousness. It is hoped that this paper can provide some reference value for future studies of interlingual subtitling and memetics.