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 pergences 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.54088

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; the Big Bang Theory; humor translation

摘要幽默是一种普遍存在的人类现象，在社会生活的方方面面都起着至关重要的调节作用，它能缓解紧张尴尬的气氛，它能带来欢乐和愉悦。随着不同国家间的交流变得越来越频繁，大量的英语幽默作品被引入中国，而美剧则受到越来越多中国年轻人，尤其是英语学习者的青睐，观看配有翻译字幕的美剧是一种有效的学习英语和进行文化交流的手段。但是，英语幽默一直被翻译界界定为不可译的，因为翻译英语幽默需要充分了解目的语与原语的文化和语言的分歧,所以本研究尝试从关联理论角度，以《生活大爆炸》为研究对象，对幽默翻译做一个个案研究。

本文首先回顾了关联理论和言语幽默的相关理论，重点从关联理论的角度探讨《生活大爆炸》中的幽默案例翻译（本文中研究的言语幽默翻译案例的中文字幕均转自搜狐网的字幕翻译组），归纳该剧中的幽默翻译方法，以期为关联理论的应用与幽默翻译的研究作出一点贡献。

毕业论文关键词：关联理论；《生活大爆炸》；幽默翻译

Contents

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. 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 

1. Introduction

Serving as a significance part in enriching our lives and making it more joyful, humor is increasingly becoming a part of intercultural communication. As the communication between China and other countries becomes more and more frequent, China has inevitably imported a lot of famous works on humor and a lot of American TV series also gain the popularity in China as they offer a way to learn English quickly and easily. However, humor translation is not an easy job as a result of language and cultural barriers.

The Big Bang Theory，first released in 2007, is an American situation comedy set in Pasadena, California. The core character in this play is Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist, who has an IQ of 187, but his EQ is incredibly low. He works hard at his academic researches but rarely pays attention to other people’s feelings. With a strange sense of humor, he sometimes makes his friends mad as he is too self-absorbed for the most of the time.