A Study On Subtitle Translation Strategy Of American Sitcoms

In recent years, with globalization, there have been more and more opportunities of economicand cultural exchanges among countries in the world. Therefore, China has more opportunities ofsharing sources with other countries, including science and technology, culture, ideology, andvisual media and other resources. There are a lot of persons being fans of foreign TV series inChina now, especially American situation comedy. The Big Bang Theory, as the most popularAmerican situation comedy now, has a lot of fans that are crazy about it for its humorous linesand performers’ exaggerated expressions. The aim of situation comedy is making people laugh.The lines of sitcoms mostly are constituted of lots of puns, wordplays and rhetorical metaphor.The fans mostly are those with certain education degrees, they can easily use the Internet andhave certain language basis. But they may not have the abilities of understanding the realmeanings of the plots without watching the subtitles. Therefore, each subtitle translation groupplays an important role. However, for lacking of cultural background and professionalknowledge; some subtitle translation groups did not translate the lines in appropriate ways andcouldn’t convey the original funny meaning.However, domestic studies on subtitle translation lag behind that of the Western. Therefore, theydo not achieve an agreement on translation strategy and principle, and the principles they havedo not normalize. This thesis aims to find out the appropriate strategies for American situationcomedy by analyzing the lines of The Big Bang Theory through functionalist approach andcooperative principle of conversational implicature.Through the research, the author summed up some strategies appropriate for American situation comedy. Considering the skopostheorie, the author fully considered the purpose of the sourcetext to propose translation strategies of fidelity, colloquial, euphemism and flexibility. Accordingto the purpose of the target audience, the author proposed the strategy for the target audience.According to tempo and spatial constraints of subtitle, the author proposed the reductionstrategy.