Survey Of Subtitling And Dubbing In Situation Comedy"Growing Pains" And Applicability Of Delabastita’s Theory Of Pun Translation

English situation comedy (sitcom) is a media for trans-cultural communication in modern era. Yet, its humor causes barriers for the "cultural trip", among which puns are even defined by most of the translation theorists as untranslatable or hardly translatable. However, as time passing by, the audience of a translated sitcom starts to comprehend the humor from abroad with the translators adopting flexible translation strategies. Those efforts have altered the untranslatability of humor into translatability for the exchange of English and Chinese culture.At present, the major modes of audiovisual translation in China are dubbing and subtitling. In this regard, this survey will compare the two translation modes of an American sitcom "Growing pains" to analyze the applicability of a theory of pun translation raised by a Belgium scholar Dirk Delabastita. While the theory was only discussed within the frame of literary translation in the past, the survey attempts to create linkage between the translation theory and audiovisual translation, contributing to the trans-boundary study of audiovisual translation, humor studies and pun translation.The dissertation consists of five chapters. Chapter One introduces the selected sitcom "Growing pains", points out the current situation of audiovisual translation studies and the relationship between audiovisual translation and literary translation and describes the purpose, scale and methodology of this survey. Chapter Two analyzes the characteristics of sitcoms, where verbal and non-verbal humor and their biding influence on subtitling and dubbing translation modes are distinguished. Chapter Three focuses on Delabastita’s theory of pun translation and the ten strategies included, based on which its applicability for English-to-Chinese translation is observed. Chapter Four conducts a study on the examples taken from the Chinese dubbing and subtitling versions of "Growing pains" to review the applicability of Delabastita’s theory for the translation of the sitcom, along with the analysis of non-verbal humor’s role in the process of translation. Chapter Five summarizes the survey and points out the areas where further researches may be worked on.