3.1 Functional Equivalence Theory5
3.2 Skopos Theory6
3.3 Relevance Theory7
4 Analysis of Subtitle Translation of Humor in the Big Bang Theory7
4.1 Cultural Humor8
4.2 Linguistic Humor11
Conclusion 15
Acknowledgements16
Bibliography 17
 
1    Introduction
1.1    Research Background
With the development of modern science and technology, cultural exchanges between countries become more and more frequent. Nowadays, people in China have been exposed to large amounts of foreign cultures, among which foreign movies and TV series, typically, sitcoms imported from America have gained great popularity among Chinese people. Topics around American sitcoms have become incredibly common in young people’s chat.

American humor usually concerns aspects of American culture. Because of the variables of geographical locations, culture, level of education and context, the extent to which an inpidual will personally find something humorous obviously varies. Therefore, people of different countries will find different situations funny. Just as American culture differs from that of other countries, these cultural differences may be a barrier to translating humor into another language. Thus, this poses another question that how to translate humorous language into target language as native as possible, which means how to promote the quality of translation of American humor into the target language--Chinese. What the audiences expect is a complete enjoyment of the show with no barrier caused by cultural differences. Serving as supplementary approaches of enjoying the play, subtitles are texts that are added to audio-visual products in order to assist the audiences to understand the show in case they miss the words and had difficulty in catching up with the plot. Besides, subtitles also offer some explanatory information when exotic culture-related conversations beyond the common sense of the audiences occur. Without subtitling, ordinary non-native speakers can hardly achieve the same enjoyment as native speakers do. Hence, translation plays an indispensible role in conveying information from source language to target language. It is becoming increasingly important to better subtitle translation. Even professor Qian Shaochang calls on more attention to subtitle translation field. (钱绍昌, 2000:61) In recent years, as more and more foreign TV programs have been imported, translators pay more attention to the quality of subtitle translation, which calls for more professional translating strategy as guidance.

The Big Bang Theory is one of the most popular sitcoms in America. It is also overwhelmingly popular all around the world. In China, young educated people have adopted it as an important part of daily entertainment, which requires a better translation of American humor in its dialogues. Thus, this paper will take The Big Bang Theory as an example case to analyze subtitle translation of American humor in a detailed way.

1.2 Methodology
The discussion of translation theories has gone on for centuries both at home and abroad. However, there is still no translation maxim serving as universally-adapted rule in translation practice. Yet, it is undeniable that they paved a way for future study. Based on their discussions and results, we can make some detailed analysis to find the most practical and flexible strategy for subtitle translation, so that the translation can meet the demand of audiences to the largest degree. This paper probes to classify the humorous language phenomena in The Big Bang Theory, and specifically discuss them part by part.

Generally, this paper adopted a descriptive-contrastive methodology. First, it makes a clear classification of humor in The Big Bang Theory, and then discusses the suitable translation strategy that is applicable for each of them.

2. Literature Review
2.1 Subtitle Translation  
Subtitles are texts that appear on the screen for a short period of time as a supplementary approach for viewers to better understand the show. Generally, there are four features of subtitle translation: immediate, meaning that if the audiences miss the image or fails to understand the line, the pictures will not reappear; restriction, meaning that the space and time for subtitle is limited, because the translated subtitle cannot cause disturbance for watching; comprehensiveness, meaning that subtitles should interact with the images, dialogues, background music, and even the performance of the roles; commonness, meaning the language used in subtitles should be common and simple in order to be acceptable by people of different education levels. Gottlieb (Gottlieb, Henrik, 1994) pides subtitles into two categories: intralingual and interlingual subtitle. The former involves no target language. The latter involves both source language (for listeners to catch up with the role’s accent) and target language (for non-native speakers to better understand the show, also rules out cultural barriers for them). “生活大爆炸”中美式幽默的翻译方法研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_7855.html