On The Transference Of The Verbal Humors In Alice's Adventures In Wonderland

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is a masterpiece of English children's literature. It was written by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll and published in 1865. Owing to its unique richness in philosophical meanings and absurdity and humor in literary aesthetics, it strongly attracts children readers,even adults readers. From the point of translation, because the author used lots of wordplay and rhetorical devices, it was once considered"an untranslatable book". However since its publication in England in 1865, it has been translated into more than twenty languages. So in Britain,it is second only to Bible and Shakespeare's works. In China,it was translated and published firstly by Zhao Yunren in 1922. After that,there are more than dozens of translated versions,but the professional discussion about its translation is rarely seen. This thesis will focus on its translation difficulty that is the translation of humorous language under the guidance of the Skopostheorie,and select the translation of three representatives to conduct a comparative analysis.The body of this thesis is composed by four chapters. The first chapter is a simple introduction of the significance of this topic and its literature review. The second chapter is the analysis of the theory. This paper takes the Skopos theory which belongs to the Germany Functional School as the guide to conduct the comparative study of the several Chinese versions of the novel. Firstly the chapter makes a brief introduction of the theory, including basic definition, development and application. And then simply states the Skopos in the humor translation. The core concept of the Skops is that the main factor to decide the whole translation process is the purpose of the overall translation behavior. According to the analysis of Vermeer,the purpose in the translation process may lie in three aspects: (1)the translator's general purpose of the translation process (2)the communicative purpose aimed at by the target text in the target situation; and (3)the purpose aimed at by a particular translation strategy or procedure. Here what is associated with translation of verbal humors is the second purpose that is the communicative purpose. If a joke which makes people laugh to cry in the original text is translated into target text without any laughing but silence,it must be a failure translation. This chapter also briefly discusses the strategies taken during the process of translation according to the Skopos, namely literality, domestication and adding notes. The third chapter is the brief introduction of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It includes the introduction of the author Carroll, the content and background of the novel, the characteristics and its humor language. From that statement, we know that the novel was written for children. There is not serious teaching but humorous and absurd story. The novel is full of wordplay and nonsense with an aim to amuse his children readers. Therefore,facing the book like Alice's Adventures in Wonderland whose most important feature is humor,translators should reproduce the same humorous effect to achieve its communicative purpose to make readers laugh while reading the book. The fourth chapter is the specific case analysis. It first gives the brief introduction of its process being translated into China and the chosen three Chinese versions. And the next part is the case analysis. According to the different rhetorical devices to make humorous effect, examples are taken to compare three versions. The rhetorical devices include pun, simile, hyperbole, parody and malapropism. Through the specific comparative analysis, the paper tries to point out which version is in accordance with the requirement of the Skopos and then has a better effect. And also it will point out that some places to be improved.