A Study On Subtitling Strategies Of Verbal Humor In Sitcom The Big Bang Theory

In recent years, an increasing number of western audiovisual products are flooding into China, among which American sitcoms attract lots of audiences for their abundant humor. Because of language and culture difference, high-quality subtitling plays a vital role in delivering humorous effect. For this, the author of the present research chooses the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory(TBBT) as the object of this research. This study tries exploring subtitling strategies of verbal humor and examining whether these strategies achieve the equivalent humorous effect or not in TBBT from the perspective of Communicative Translation Theory. The core content of Communicative Translation Theory is reader-oriented, which “attempts to produce on its readers an effect as close as possible to that obtained on the readers of the original”(Newmark, 2001 b, p.39).According to humor categories of Raphaelson-West(1989, pp.129-132), the author first classifies humor in TBBT into four categories: universal humor, cultural humor, word-play humor and science-related humor, then analyzes the translation strategies adopted concerning different types of humor to examine whether these strategies achieve the equivalent funny effect or not, and finally finds out what subtitling strategies are the most frequently used in different types of verbal humor and analyzes the reasons.Based on the case study, the conclusions of this thesis can be drawn as follows: Firstly, in TBBT, the translator adopts different strategies in translating different types of humor, and not all the strategies help the target language audience receive the equivalent humorous effect as the original. In translating universal humor, literal translation and substitution strategies are applied, of which 93% achieve the equivalent humorous effect. In translating cultural humor, the following 7 strategies are adopted: literal translation, notes on the top of the screen, notes within the text, substitution, official equivalent, explication and omission. However, only 31% of them achieve the equivalent humorous effect. As for subtitling of word-play humor, the mainly adopted strategies are notes within the text, literal translation, notes on the top of the screen and substitution. Among these strategies, 84% of them convey the humorous effect equivalently. In translating science-related humor, the subtitler applies literal translation, notes within the text and notes on the top of the screen, and 88% of them convey the equivalent humorous effect successfully. Secondly, the subtitling of cultural humor achieves the minimum humorous effect, which is due to using improper translation strategies. Thirdly, the subtitler adopts a lot of notes within the text and notes on the top of the screen in subtitling, which breaks through the traditional characteristics of audiovisual translation — no annotation.