Humor Translation In Subtitling From The Perspective Of Relevance Translation Theory

With the rapid development of information technology, a great variety of foreignmovies and TV programmes have been flooding into Chinese market since1990s amongwhich American sitcom is enjoying great popularity among young netizens mainly due toits ingenious design of humor. This thesis attempts to probe into humor translation insubtitling of American sitcoms in the light of Relevance Translation Theory through a caseanalysis of the translated Chinese subtitles of an American sitcom, The Big Bang Theory(TBBT) which is intended to prove the strong explanatory power of RTT, to explore andsum up specific strategies and methods for humor translation in subtitling and to brings anew and fresh perspective to humor and subtitle translation studies.Relevance Translation Theory(RTT) is one theory with great explanatory power putforth on the foundation of Relevance Theory by Ernst August Gutt, a student of Sperberand Wilson. Within the theoretical framework of RTT, translation is a special form ofcommunication between two languages as well as an inferential process which complieswith the general rules of communication. Translators bear the responsibility to try to makethe intentions of the source text author meet the expectations of the receivers of thetranslated text so as to achieve the optimal relevance which is to enable the receivers toacquire adequate contextual effects through minimum processing efforts. Therefore, thetranslator plays a double role in inferential process, that is to say, the translator has todeduce the author’s intention from communicative clues, in the meantime, he has to takethe target reader’s cognitive environments into consideration.The author of this thesis chooses TBBT as case analysis materials and adopts RTT toexplore and summarize the strategies and techniques of humor translation in subtitling. Theauthor firstly analyses the characteristics of both subtitle translation and humor translation;then the author gives a brief account of Relevance Theory and Relevance TranslationTheory aiming to manifest the explanatory power and instructive significance of RTT forhumor translation in subtitling; at last, the author applies the RTT to the analysis of specific examples of translated subtitles in TBBT to discover the merits and weak points and comeup with possible solutions. Meanwhile, the author points out that subtitle translator shouldadopt flexible and appropriate strategies with certain complementary techniques to achieveoptimal relevance and to ensure the communicative validity and humorous effect.