Research On Humor Translation Based On Nord’s Functional Translation Approach

With the increasingly frequent exchange between China and foreign countries,there come numerous foreign audiovisual productions in Chinese film and television media,with a flood of outstanding sitcoms sweeping into domestic market through multifarious mediums simultaneously.Sitcom,as the main form of comedies in the media era,which has been favored by audience for its uniqueness in the idea of photographing scenes,is filled with humor and vividness.The subtitling of foreign sitcoms,a special translation mode,is most important of all to convey humorous effect.However,there are distinct differences between the Chinese and English language in thinking mode,cognitive style and language culture,thus humor translation is also regarded as a very challenging task.With regard to this,some Chinese and foreign scholars have made lots of research,viewing humor translation as extremely difficult as poem translation.Besides,as a peculiar type of texts,subtitles will be interpreted in a wrong way with some disadvantages standing in the way.Therefore,the twists and turns of humor translation are self-evident.With the bilingual subtitles for Modern Family used as a case,this thesis focuses on the source text analysis including intratextual and extratextual factors guided by Nord’s functional translation approach.The author makes research on humor translation in Modern Family,from which cases are chosen to evaluate the humor translation based on American culture,customs and idioms in this sitcom,followed by the analysis of translation approaches.The purpose of this study is to make the research of humor translation more practical and theoretical.At the same time,the author points out the innovative value of the thesis and its shortcomings,hoping to partly enlighten the study of Chinese film and television humor translation in the future.Few findings can be drawn from the following aspects: 1)The grasp of the theoretical connotation.As a powerful theoretical support for the research of humor translation,Nord’s functional translation approach consists of text function,function plus loyalty principle,translation brief,source text analysis,etc.Based on the detailed explanation as the above discussion,it offers a theoretical foundation for further humor translation in sitcom.2)The distinction of variety of humor.Three different types of humor need to be taken into account in regard to exerting an influence on target readers’ acceptability of source language humor.Through some cases of Modern Family,the whole thesis focuses on the detailed analysis of humor translation based on linguistic humor,cultural humor and situational humor,thus balancing intentions of the authors,expectation and receptivity of the addresses and other variety of influencing factors for better understanding of the source language culture.3)The convey of the humor effect.With regard to delivery of source language humor to target readers,it’s necessary to depend upon the coordination for translation strategies in different types of texts.This thesis attempts to make further study of documentary and instrumental translation,which are essential for the extensive study on humor translation,contributing to the deeper understanding about its American proverbs,idioms and culture.