Abstract

Humor, which is a very common expression in our daily life, makes you feel less stressed, creates joy and happiness and plays a significance role in interchanging attitudes, ideas and emotions. With the communication between different countries becoming more and more frequent, a large number of English humorous works have been brought into China, and American TV series have also gained its popularity among young people, for watching American TV series with subtitles can be seen as a good way to learn English and enjoy the humor. In these TV series, the humor makes people laugh and feel happy. However, translation of humor has been regarded as an impossible task due to various cultural and linguistic divergences between target language and source language. The thesis, taken the Big Bang Theory as the research object, attempts to have a case study about its humor translation from the perspective of Relevance Theory.

Starting from an overview of Relevance Theory and humor, this thesis mainly focuses on the humor translation in the Big Bang Theory from the perspective of Relevance Theory and tries to summarize the methods adopted in the humor translation in the play, hoping to offer some suggestions for the application of Relevance Theory and humor translation.

Keywords: relevance theory; humor translation; the Big Bang Theory

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-1

2. Literature Review-2

2.1 An Introduction of Relevance Theory-2

2.2 A Brief Review on Humor Translation-3

3. The Humor Translation in The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of Relevance Theory-6

3.1 Addition-6

3.2 Reduction-8

3.3 Replacement-9

3.4 Recreation-11

4. Conclusion-12

Works Cited-13