Humor Translation In The Sitcom Good Luck Charlie From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the rapid development of information technology and widespread of internet,the exchange between Chinese culture and western culture are getting intimate.China has brought more and more foreign sitcom.The representative sitcoms such as Friends,Broke Girls and Good Luck Charlie,have been pursued and loved by young people because of their humorous dialogues and life plots.However,due to language differences,most people appreciate foreign sitcom with the help of subtitle,to a large extent,the success or failure of subtitle translation affects the smooth of cultural exchange.So the deep study in subtitle translation is particularly important.1986,Sperber and Wilson put forward the relevance theory,they emphasized that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process.As an inference theory of human communication,the relevance theory aims to reveal how the listener infers the speaker’s intended meaning.In other words,the intention of speaker should be conveyed to listener as explicitly as possible in communicative activities.Based on the relevance theory,1991,Gutt published a work which studied relevance theory and translation---Translation and Relevance:Cognition and Context.He proposed Relevance-Theoretic Approach to translation in his book.He regarded translation as an interlingual interpretive use,and translator’s aim is to pursue optimal relevance.During the translation process,the task of translator is to take a full consideration of cognitive environment between source-text reader and the target-text reader,let the target-text reader gets adequate contextual effects with necessary effort,and then complete communicative task successfully.Therefore,during the translation process of sitcom,a successful subtitle translation should let the target language audience fully understand the communicative intention of original language sitcom maker,and help the target language audience achieve the optimal relevance.That is to say,a fine translation will achieve the optimal contextual effects by the least processing effort,and then successfully accomplish the communication.The paper applies the relevance theory to humor translation in sitcom,and launches a case study of Good Luck Charlie,analyzing and studying its humorous language.By analyzing the subtitle of Deefun,the paper tries to explore how to find the optimal relevance between the original language and the target language in context,and keep its humorous effects.Meanwhile,the paper illustrates the translation strategies and translation methods used in subtitle of American sitcom Good Luck Charlie,which thereby provide theoretical and methodological reference for humor translation in sitcom.