2.1 A Brief Introduction of Functional Equivalence 2

2.2 The Definition, Classification and Features of Subtitle 3

2.3 The Definition, Classification and Features of Humor 4

2.4 A Historical Review of Translation of Humor in Subtitles 5

3. Two and a Half Men and Its Humor 6

3.1 A Brief Introduction of Two and a Half Men 6

3.2 Classification of Humor in Two and a Half Men 7

4. Translation of Humor in Subtitle in Two and a Half Men from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence 8

4.1 Translation of General Verbal Humor 9

4.2 Translation of Culture-related Humor 10

4.3 Translation of Humor in Wordplay 13

5. Conclusion 15

Works Cited 17 

1. Introduction

The sitcom is a main form of comedy in the media era. It earned much popularity with its frequent comedy conflicts, facetious dialogues, and vivid characterization. American sitcoms originated in 1940s have incurred great effects in our China as well as in America. By watching American sitcom, Chinese audiences can get access to real and vivid American local customs, thinking modes, and cultural connotations. Nowadays the young Chinese consider watching American sitcom as a trend of times.

With the improvement of the English levels especially that of the young, many Chinese people prefer to watch original American TV series rather than dubbed ones which sound awkward. But audiences cannot understand the dialogues in the series correctly and exactly all the time. So subtitles play a vital role in conveying information suggested in the series. It is not difficult for the audience to understand Chinese subtitles, but it is hard for translators to produce proper subtitles. How to convey precise humor effects as well as messages without leading to ambiguity? How to get the equivalent response between target audiences and source language audiences? Some kind of embarrassment is caused by the failure of subtitle translation when the target audiences should laugh but they do not. Because of this, the requirement concerning the quality of the media production becomes higher and higher. 

Two and a Half Men tells a story of two men and a little boy and it wins the comedy series ratings repeatedly with impressive results and several Emmy Awards which makes people sit up and take notice. A descriptive-contrastive methodology is applied in this thesis to study translation of humor in subtitles of Two and a Half men. As is known to all, theory is to serve the practice and meanwhile makes practice the ultimate purpose. Therefore, more attention should be paid to the research of descriptive direction. This thesis applies a descriptive-contrastive methodology. It firstly classifies the humor in Two and a Half Men, and then analyzes the versions of humor rendered with perse translation methods. A conclusion could be drawn that the translator could achieve functional equivalence in humor translation making good use of different methods. That is to say, when watching sitcoms with much humor in subtitles, the target readers should respond quite similarly or the same to the source language readers.

2. Literature Review

2.1 A Brief Introduction of Functional Equivalence

Among the scholars’ researches on functional theory in translation, Nida’s efforts are the most influential theoretically and practically. Equivalence is one of the core issues in translation studies. Nida emphasizes a closet natural equivalence in the meaning and form between the target and source languages. One of the most important goals of translation is recreating the messages of the source text. The translator should consider equivalence rather than identity as the translation principle. An ideal translated version should be natural and like a text written by native people rather than a translated one. Nida holds that there are mainly two important kinds of equivalence--formal and dynamic equivalence. The formal equivalence focuses on the message itself, including the form and content of those messages. Explanation is one of representing translation strategies of this translation theory. To let the readers comprehend the clues and the thoughts under different customs better, extra necessary explanations are often added to the translation version. Formal equivalence is source language-oriented translation theory. However, the translators usually ignore the relationship between the messages conveyed by source language text and target language text respectively in dynamic equivalence translation. On the contrary, they pursue a dynamic relationship between target language readers and target language text which is equivalent to the relationship between source language readers and source language text. The inner requirement lying in dynamic equivalence translation for the translators is to express naturally and abundantly. During the process, the side effects generated by language and culture will be an obstacle to be solved by the translators. In results, some restrictions can be realized in terms of dynamic equivalence translation.源`自,优尔`.论"文'网[www.youerw.com 功能对等理论看《好汉两个半》的幽默字幕翻译(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_58866.html