On The Translation Of Sitcom Subtitle From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

As cross-cultural communication between China and other countries becomes frequent and goes deeper, more and more foreign movies and TV series have flooded into China. Among them, American movies and TV series are particularly popular. With the popularity of the English language, many young Chinese people prefer to watch the original show with translated subtitles, which they consider as a fashion and a good way of learning English. Consequently, translated subtitles, functioning as a bridge between the original show and the target receptors, become increasingly important. Subtitling, one of the main types of audiovisual translation, has become a hot subject in translation studies attracting more and more attention. However, compared with traditional translation researches, subtitle translation theory is far from mature and systematic.Friends is a classic American sitcom which has achieved tremendous success all over the world. There are also numerous fans of Friends in China. This thesis attempts to research into translation of sitcom subtitle within the framework of Nida’s functional equivalence theory, with Friends as a case study. Functional equivalence theory focuses on receptor response, measuring translation by whether the receptors of the translated text have equivalent response as the original receptors. As a TV show, sitcom highly values the receptors, for its popularity and success heavily depend on the audiences’response. Thus Nida’s functional equivalence theory is very suitable for subtitling studies.This thesis combines the linguistic approach and the communicative approach to equivalence and applies them to subtitling of Friends. With some typical subtitling examples as illustrations, this thesis analyzes one Chinese subtitled version of Friends at phonetic and phonologic, word and above word, syntactic, pragmatic, cultural and stylistic levels, exploring whether it achieves functional equivalence and how it can achieve it. Under the guidance of functional equivalence theory, various strategies are summed up including some traditional translation skills such as amplification, omission, conversion (of parts of speech), negation, division, the change of the voices, paraphrase, etc. According to the principles for producing functional equivalence, some suggestions are put forward. Based on the time and space constraints of subtitling, reduction is a vey important strategy and more condensed version is preferred. Due to the great differences between the English and Chinese languages and the two related cultures, adding proper notes is sometimes necessary. Since sitcom aims at entertaining audience and succeeds by means of its colloquial, plain, witty and humorous languages, the translation of its subtitles tends to choose domestication,"moving the writer of the sitcom and its characters toward the reader of the translated subtitles". In this way, domestication will give resonance to the target viewers.In the end, the thesis points out that functional equivalence theory can provide a new approach and enlightenment and effectively instruct subtitlers in their translation practice. However, as different target receptors and different original receptors differ in understanding and appreciating the show, the comparability between the response of the target receptors and that of the original receptors is limited. Therefore, functional equivalence theory has limitations in its application to subtitling.