On Translating Humor In The Big Bang Theory From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

With the rapid development of globalization,film and television play a more and more important role in intercultural communication.Sitcom characterized by humorous dialogues and relaxed atmosphere wins great popularity among young generation in China.Due to the fact that lots of Chinese audience cannot speak English,translation becomes the most important way for them to understand dialogues and appreciate the plot.However,compared with other kinds of translation activities,audiovisual translation,especially audiovisual humor translation did not get enough attention.Under such circumstance,this thesis aims to find how to translate audiovisual humor to help Chinese audience appreciate different kinds of humor in sitcom.Humor is not only a kind of language phenomenon,but also a cultural phenomenon.The study of humor has a long history and great achievements are made in this field at home and abroad.However,studies on how to translate humor,especially how to translate audiovisual humor in sitcom are relatively rare.According to its communicating channel,the author groups humor in sitcom into nonverbal acoustic humor,nonverbal visual humor,verbal visual humor and verbal humor.At the same time,verbal humor is further classified into universal humor,humor caused by wordplay and culture-specific humorUnder the guidance of functional equivalence theory,this thesis is undertaken to take The Big Bang Theory's translation given by Souhu Video as the research object and to study the following two questions: firstly,whether nonverbal acoustic humor,nonverbal visual humor and verbal visual humor can be understood and appreciated by Chinese audience without the help of translation;if not,what kind of translation methods should be chosen by translators;secondly,what kind of translation methods are chosen by Sohu Video to translate verbal humor so as to help Chinese audience fully appreciate it.This study finds that among collected examples,most of nonverbal acoustic humor,nonverbal verbal humor and verbal visual humor cannot be understood and appreciated by Chinese audience without the help of translation.Under such occasion,gloss and substitution are the most effective ways to translate these types of humor;in most cases,Sohu Video chooses literal translation,gloss and substitution to translate verbal humor.