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Leonard Hofstadter, who shares the apartment with Sheldon Cooper, is an experimental physicist born into a family full of accomplished scientists. Compared with Sheldon Cooper, he is much more friendly and knows how to communicate with other people. He likes his neighbor Penny, an outgoing and attractive girl who wants to be an actress but ends up working as a waitress. She is not very smart.
Howard Wolowitz and Rajesh Koothrappali are their friends. Rajesh is a particle astrophysicist. He is very shy and cannot talk to girls without drinking alcohol. Howard speaks several languages and likes showing off his language talents in front of girls. He thinks he is good at flirting but in fact most girls are repelled by his annoying behavior.
A beautiful girl and four “science geeks” make up the story and they create different kinds of verbal humor according to their different characters.
In this thesis, some examples from this famous American TV series the Big Bang Theory will be categorized to illustrate the explanatory power of Relevance Theory, which is proposed by Sperber and Wilson and focuses more on context and the cognitive environment and may be applied successfully to humor translation.
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2.1 An Introduction of Relevance Theory
Relevance theory is presented by Sperber and Wilson. It turns out to be a quite infusive theory on coetaneous pragmatic research. Some basic principles of Relevance Theory in this part will be declared to give the essential information to understand the theory.
According to Sperber and Wilson, the capacity to make inferences from behavior of other people, is the significant mental ability which makes people able to exchange ideas with each other (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 54). Thus in Relevance Theory, translation is a kind of communication and it can be regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. The communicator needs to produce an oral stimulus. Then the audience can infer what the communicator “means” from what he says, that’s to say, what his communicative intention and informative intention are in terms of Relevance Theory.
If someone asked me, “Can you tell me the way to Nanjing Railway Station?” My answer may be, “Sorry, I am a stranger here myself.” In this case, the questioner would get the information from my answer that I cannot offer the necessary information which he is asking by saying “I am a stranger here myself.”(Gutt, 2004: 25).
Relevance Theory defines context as “a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumption about the world”, more specifically, “It is the set of prerequisite used in explaining that discourses.” (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 15) What is the context in this view? It involves all kinds of information stored in the listener’s mind, such as religious beliefs, future expectations, and common sense, instead of being limited to the physical environment of your communication or the utterances that you are saying. As a result it can contribute to utterance interpretation.