A Relevance Theoretical Approach To Verbal Humor Translation In Broke Girls

As an important part in American entertainment culture, American TV comedies are receiving more and more attentions from Chinese audiences. The charm of comedy lies in its humor effect. The verbal humors in TV comedies are playing an important part in the circulation of the abovementioned comedies. Therefore, in order to help the Chinese audiences appreciate the humor; the verbal humors translation from English subtitles to Chinese subtitles is of great significance.This paper, taken Relevance Theory as the framework, illustrates key concepts such as relevance, clue, processing effort, maximum relevance and optimal relevance through literature review. It analyzes subtitle translation features, time and space constraints. On this basis, the paper takes American TV comedy Broke Girls as an example, conduct analysis on humorous English to Chinese subtitle translation from phonetic, morpheme, lexical, and rhetoric levels under the guidance of Relevance Theory. In humorous English to Chinese subtitle translation, the author offers three strategies:to keep source language clues, to maintain the gap between maximum relevance and optimal relevance, and to maintain a degree of difficulty of the target audience’s processing effort.This paper is divided into five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to research background, significance and structure of the paper. The second part describes the theory and application. Firstly, I summarize the relevance theory and research on verbal humor in recent years; Secondly, it introduces the theory and related key concepts associated with translation theory and its application in the translation of verbal humor, and this provides a theoretical foundation to the study of this paper. The third part, it is a brief introduction to the concept of subtitle translation, features and constraints. Then it analyzes examples from Broke Girls under the guidance of Relevance Theory. The fourth part sums up translation strategies. The fifth part contains the conclusion, research constraints, and an outlook on the anticipation of Relevance Theory to humorous translation in English to Chinese subtitle translation.