Subtitling Translation Of American Humor In The Big Bang Theory

With deepening cultural communication between China and the western countries, more and more foreign audiovisual works have swarmed into the Chinese market, among which are American situation comedies. As a special audiovisual genre, American sitcom is featured by humor. Therefore, humor translation plays a decisive role in understanding and appreciating the sitcoms by the target language audience and has profound influences on cross-cultural communication.For much of the history, dubbing is a dominant form of audiovisual translation. Under the context of globalization in the era of the Internet, however, it seems that subtitled audiovisual works are accepted by more and more Chinese audience. A few hours after broadcast in America, American sitcoms with Chinese subtitles can be downloaded free in China. The increasing popularity of subtitling in China is certainly contributed by a fansub group who voluntarily create Chinese subtitles for foreign TV programs through free Internet downloading.Based on the core theory of functional translation approaches—Skopostheorie, this thesis presents a case study of the humor translation in the popular American sitcom The Big Bang Theory by analyzing the translation strategies which the translators adopt when translating different types of humor in this sitcom. It applies the three basic rules in humor translation and then tries to summarize some translation techniques for the translation of universal, culture-based and linguistic humors. The translator is suggested to take the reproduction of humorous effect of the source text as the chief principle and choose appropriate translation strategies so as to make the target audience perceive the humor of the source language in accordance with their expectations and the cultural customs of the target language. In this case, the translators are part of the target audience, mainly made up of college students and white-collar workers. We can draw a conclusion that it is not necessary for the translators to achieve a universal understanding of the source text, for the target audience is such a small group of people. As long as the small group of people could understand the rendered subtitles easily, the choice of strategies is deemed correct and feasible.