A Study On The Chinese Subtitling Of Metaphors In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of The Relevance Theory

With the rapid development of the Internet in recent years,there have been more and more foreign movies and TV series which are popular among the Chinese audiences.American sitcom The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular,and it has won the Emmy nominations for many times.It is featured with its humorous language.Its linguistic features have been studied from the perspectives of subtitling,humor,euphemism and so on.Nevertheless,its metaphors have not been extensively investigated.This thesis intends to investigate the Chinese subtitling of the English metaphors in this sitcom from the perspective of Relevance Theory.Relevance Theory was put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in 1986.It was applied to translation by Ernst-August Gutt.There are two main points by Relevance Theory.The first one is the context effect.Relevance Theory regards that translation must reach the optimal relevance which means the audiences gets the same sufficient contextual effect with the audiences of original language through spending the smallest efforts.The second one is that translation is an ostensive--inferential process between two languages.To fulfill the communication,the translator should get the implied meaning from the original language,show it to the audiences and help the audiences get optimal relevance with the original language.Both the two points are suitable to investigate the metaphor translation.This thesis includes three chapters.The first one presents the metaphors in The Big Bang Theoryconcerning with their features,functions and classification.The second one analyzes the metaphors subtitling with regard to relevance.The third one analyzes36 examples chosen from The Big Bang Theory under the guidance of Relevance Theory.According to the analysis,we can get two main principles about metaphor translation.The first one is that the metaphor is one of thinking method;in metaphor translation,we should convey the thinking of the writer to the audiences.The second one is that the speaking of people has two purposes to be fulfilled: the informative purpose and the communicative purpose.So in metaphor translation,the translator should pay attention to the context and the best relevance between the origin language and targeted audiences.