On The Translation Of Humor In Sitcom Friends From Context Theory

With the frequent exchanges between countries, a great variety of foreign moviesand TV programs have been lfooding into Chinese market, among which Americansitcom Friends is enjoying great popularity among Chinese audiences, mainly due toits ingenious design of humor. Humorous language? as a special form of language, cannot be produced and understood without taking consideration of the inherent law oflanguage and the language environment like context. Therefore，we can easily inferthat the understanding of humor needs the guidance of context theory. This thesisattempts to probe into humor translation in American sitcom Friends and explorespeciifc strategies and methods for humor translation in sitcoms in light of contexttheory, which brings a new and fresh perspective to humor translation studies.This thesis, mainly adopting the context theory in Halliday and Professor PengLiyuan, analyses the relation between context and humor from linguistic context,situational context, and cultural context. What’s more，based on Cartford’s contextualequivalence theory, this thesis puts forward the principle of contextual equivalenceapplied to humor translation which can be concluded in four points:1) meaning isderived from context;2) as for the situational-context humor, translation equivalencedepends on the same contextual features at situational context level;3) as for thecultural-context humor, translation equivalence depends on the functionally relevantfeatures of context at cultural context level;4) as for the linguistic-context humor,translation equivalence depends on the functionally relevant features of context atlinguistic context level.The thesis explores the humor translation strategies and methods with the sitcomFriends as a case study under the guidance of contextual equivalence. After analyzingthe weak points in previous studies, this thesis states that we should make clearclassiifcation of humor and adopt different translation strategies according to different humors. On one hand, this paper, within the framework of context theory, carries outa study on humorous speech corpus selected from Friends and points out the causes ofhumor and the failure in understanding humor from the perspective of situationalcontext, cultural context, and linguistic context. On the other hand, this thesis provesthe explanatory power and guiding power of contextual equivalent theory through itsintroduction. Meanwhile, combining Professor Peng Li’yuans view, the author appliesboth the subjective and objective factors to the classiifcation of context incross-cultural communication from the general and special perspective. Then theauthor divides the humor into situational-context humor, cultural-context humor, andlinguistic-context humor by applying the classiifcation of context to the division ofhumors in sitcom. According to the contextual equivalent theory, the author analyzeswhether all kinds of humor translation can make the ST audiences and TT audiencesachieve the best contextual equivalence so as to realize the same contextual effect.Through the analysis and classiifcation of humor translation instances in Friends, thisthesis points out its merits and weak points and then explores the translation strategiesand methods of humor. Finally, the author comes up with a possible solution whichcan be showed as follows: domestication and foreignization should be taken as themain translation strategies for situational-context humor and cultural-context humorrespectively. This thesis presents that the equivalent translation of humor relies on thedegree of sharing context between TT and ST audiences. As for situational-contexthumor, the shared context in TT and ST audiences is general context which is high insharing degree，so translators should choose foreignization or literal translation intranslating humors in sitcoms. As for translating cultural-context humor, translatorsshould choose domestication such as paraphrasing, substitute, annotation, recreationand etc, as the context shared by TT and ST audiences is special context, which is lowin sharing degree. However, as for the linguistic-context humor, the translator shouldselect various translation strategies flexibly because of the particularity of languagestructure. Only with various methods complementing each other, the ST audiences and TT audiences can obtain the same contextual effect so as to achieve translationequivalence.