Humor Translation In The Big Bang Theory Under Functional Equivalence Theory

As a main comedy type in the media era, TV sitcom with its frequent comedic conflicts, hilarious characters and humorous dialogues has fascinated a broad band of enthusiasts. In recent years, China has gradually relaxed its import restriction on foreign audiovisual products, so there are less and less barring factors for the in-flowing of foreign audio-visual products. The Chinese audience is blessed with more freedom and access to the exotic enjoyment. But not everyone is individually capable of capturing all the hilariousness. They need a big hand, the one that knits out the subtitles and its translation. And the popularization of the foreign audio-visual products requests a better subtitle translation to escort them to their destination of spreading culture, entertaining people and eventually making a profit. Therefore, subtitle translation deserves more emphasis.The Big Bang Theory is another rising American sitcom with a great reputation among audience. It boosts plenty of unique and tricky lines, which toughen and burden the translation work. Prompt solutions are demanded for the accomplishment of conveying the precise information as well as the humor effects in this TV series. Although there were some inadequacies in the previous discussions on audio-visual translation, they have laid groundwork for this current research. Grounding on their findings, this thesis aims to explore a comparatively detailed study of humor translation in The Big Bang Theory from the perspective of functional equivalence theory. Functional equivalence theory is regarded as the most flexible, practical and applicable theory in subtitle translation, since it perfectly suits the criterion of balancing the response from the target audience to the translated subtitles and the response from the source audience to the source subtitles. It is an effective and reliable theory in subtitle translation.This thesis attempts to study some selected cases to illustrate assorted humor translation strategies that can be adopted in the light of functional equivalence theory. The author has concluded in this thesis that subtitle translation should be concise, precise, catchy and always audience-oriented, and also the functional equivalence theory is the platinum criterion to steer subtitle translating practice.