On The Application Of The Three Metafunctions Of Ststemetic-Functional Linguistics To American Situation Comedy Translation:a Case Study Of The Big Bang Theory

A situation comedy is a genre of comedy that features recurring characters in a common environment such as a home or workplace. Nowadays, with the prevalence of Friends, more and more American sitcoms become popular in China. The Systemic-functional Linguistics (SFL) developed by M.A.K Halliday, has been widely applied to translation studies by many scholars home and abroad. In the view of SFL, language is considered as one of the social systems and the functions of language can be categorized into three metafunctions:the ideational function, the interpersonal function and the textual function. According to functional grammar, meaning can be thoroughly decoded by functional analysis and this provides an ideal method for understanding the source text as well as for making a comparison between the original and the target. However, research on the application of functional linguistic to sitcom translation is rare. As an era of the thriving of sitcoms, this study should be of great significance. This paper aims to apply the three metafunctions of SFL to American sitcom translation, by analyzing when the Chinese translation (CN translation) cannot deliver the three metafunctional meanings at the same time, how to balance the choice due to sitcoms’core value and features. This paper employs a total of73examples from the latest American sitcom The Big Bang Theory for application analysis. After analyzing, this paper finds that due to humorous effect and other constraint, it is hard for CN translation to keep the three metafunctions at the same time. Yet, sitcoms core value, sitcom humor, their own colloquial language features, young and fashion target audience, etc. are all parameters for a CN translations to take into consideration. Thus, this paper argues that CN translation cannot be judged simply based on the realization of three metafunctions. People should take other parameters seriously as well. The consideration of sitcom humor, sitcom language features and sitcom target audience shed light on the balance of the three metafunctions. By using catch phrases, words and so on, CN translation should reach more resonance among audience. In the last chapter, this paper presents its suggestions which are of both theoretical and practical value.