Relevance Theory And Verbal Humor Translation

As a pragmatic theory interpreting communication, RT(Relevance Theory) has been applied to many fields due to its strong explanatory power since it was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986. Research results both at home and abroad show that RT provides a unified theoretical framework for translation and gives an insight into the communicative nature of translation, so it can explain different kinds of translation phenomena. The relevance-based account of translation theory posed by Gutt has become a new theory of directing translation at present and many scholars have done some researches on translation in the perspective of RT.Humor is not only rooted in language and culture, but also an important part of different cultures and languages. Because humor in different languages or cultures possesses particular rhetorical and cultural characteristics, the limits of translatability are prominently manifested in its translation, and some people even claim that humor is untranslatable. Humor translation is, indeed, a stimulating challenge. It requires the accurate decoding of a humorous speech in its original context, the transfer of that speech in a different and often disparate linguistic and cultural environment, and its reformation in a new utterance which successfully recaptures the intention of the original humorous message and evokes in the target audience an equivalent pleasurable and playful responseThis thesis intends to prove that RT is powerful in accounting for the theory and practice of translation, especially in explaining humorous utterance translation which has long been considered as difficult or even untranslatable, and provides a new angle for the researchers into humorous utterance translation. It covers following points:1. The debate about translatability VS. untranslatability has long been existed. With the development of translation theory, more and more people have shifted their focus from the controversy of translatability and untranslatability to the degree of translatability. Scholars are getting to realize that translation is possible but has certain limits. RT is a powerful theory which believes in translatability and does helps in translation practice.2. According to RT, translation is an act of ostensive-inferential intralingual or interlingual interpretation of a ST and the approach of translation is trivalent, which involves the writer of the source language, the translator and the reader of the TL. Under the framework of RT, anything can be translated to some extend and in some degree.3. Relevance-theoretic account of verbal humor translation is a complex form of communication which combines two different modes of communication: the coding-decoding mode and the inferential mode. The inference is based on relevance rather than rule-governed, or maxim-based. From the relevance-theory point of view the criterion to judge verbal humor translation is: transference of optimal relevance. That is, the key point of translating humor is to attempt to achieve the optimal relevance in the TL.4. Two translation methods proposed by Gutt—direct translation and indirect translation are exemplified to prove that what a great power RT has in translating humorous utterances. In general, guided by relevance principles, problems such as translatability and untranstatability, translation equivalence and so on can be all resolved.