Abstract

In the comedic genre of the media era, the situation comedy (sitcom) on TV has won popularity with a wide audience for its amusing, yet dramatic twists, humorous lines and vivid characterizations. In recent years, an increasing number of sitcoms from foreign countries, particularly the United States, have been presented to a Chinese audience through dubbing and subtitling. It’s the point of this dissertation to study how and to what extent that verbal humor in sitcoms can overcome the linguistic and cultural barriers when they are translated into other languages. It also aims at finding whether the dubbed or subtitled sitcoms can successfully elicit a good laugh from the target audience, who not only speak a different language but may not be well acquainted with the source culture. Audiovisual humor differs from traditional humor in many ways. Strong support is provided through first-hand data observed and collected by the author directly from the sitcom the Big Bang Theory.

This paper first summarizes the distinguished features of the sitcom that make it different from other TV genres and literature works. As sitcoms are mainly produced to amuse the audience, it is the humorous effect rather than the semantic information contained in the dialogues that plays a central role. Due to the big linguistic and cultural gap between English and Chinese and the uniqueness of sitcoms' humor, the research has mainly discussed the translation strategies of verbal humor cross-cultural communication. The strategies applied in the translation are analyzed and illustrated with corresponding descriptive examples. And this paper tries to contribute to the study of sitcoms verbal humor cross-cultural communication.

Key words: cross-cultural communication, verbal humor, sitcom

摘        要

作为媒体时代喜剧的一种主要形式，电视情景喜剧以频繁的喜剧冲突、幽默的人物对白以及鲜明的人物塑造广受人们喜爱。近年来，国外情景喜剧通过不同方式引入我国。情景喜剧的幽默如何能够跨越地域、语言和文化的障碍，使身处另外一个社会文化群的观众频繁发笑，则是本研究的主要出发点。在构成与传播方式上，情景喜剧的幽默与传统幽默有较大差异。本研究例证主要集中于著名的美国情景喜剧《生活大爆炸》汉译作品。
论文总结了情景喜剧的独特性。在跨文化的传播途中，我们认为，情景喜剧言语幽默的传播应具有特殊的翻译目的和原则，翻译过程中应优先考虑译作的幽默性。鉴于文化差异以及影视幽默的独特性，论文重点探讨美国情景喜剧中言语幽默的汉译策略。通过大量实例对文字游戏类言语幽默以及文化专属类言语幽默在跨文化过程中的翻译策略进行了描述性的探讨。


关键词：跨文化传播，    言语幽默，    情景喜剧