A Study on the Translation of Subtitles of Situation Comedies from the Perspective of Functional Equivalence—A Case Study of “<i>Mom</i>”

近年来，随着大量国外电视节目被引进，国外情景喜剧成为文化交流的一个重要组成部分。在此背景下，情景喜剧的字幕翻译及其相关研究取得了长足的进步。翻译国外情景喜剧字幕的一个重要目标就是让目的语观众在观看情景喜剧后产生与源语观众相同的反应。由此，功能对等理论便成为指导情景喜剧字幕翻译的一项重要方法。功能对等理论是美国语言学家尤金·奈达基于《圣经》的翻译实践发展出的理论。“功能对等”也称“动态对等”，就是说翻译时不求文字表面的死板对应，而要在两种语言间达成功能上的对等，在源语接受者和目的语接受者之间产生的反应尽可能相等，这与情景喜剧字幕翻译的目标一致。In recent years, as a large quantity of foreign TV programs are introduced into China, foreign situation comedies have become an essential part of cultural exchanges. Against this background, the translation of the subtitles of situation comedies and its related studies has made much headway. One important goal of translating the subtitles of foreign situation comedies is producing equivalent response in the audience of the target language to the audience of the source language after they watch the shows. Therefore, functional equivalence has proved an important guidance for the translation of situation comedy’s subtitles. The notion of functional equivalence is developed by Eugene Nida, an American linguist, on the basis of the practice of translating Bible. “Functional equivalence”, also known as “dynamic equivalence”, does not seek rigid correspondence on the literary level but equivalence on the functional level between two languages, making the responses generated among the source language audience and that among the target language audience to be as similar as possible, which concurs with the goal of situation comedy subtitle translation.