Approaches To Translation Of English Verbal Humor

Humor both in the West and the East has been a longstanding and eternal topic. It is a valuable heritage of human beings and unique to human beings as well. It embodies one's knowledge, wisdom and inspiration. "Sense of humor" even becomes an important norm to evaluate a person's literacy and ability.As a pervasive human phenomenon, humor plays important roles in many spheres and aspects of life, in various human interactions and especially in jokes and humorous styles. During the increasingly frequent cross-cultural communication world-wide, translation of humor should not be neglected.However, humor translation has been regarded as a despairing issue and rarely been systematically studied as a specific translation problem as a result of the linguistic and cultural differences between the source and target language. And frequently, humor makes itself an intractable problem for translators. Up to now, a debate on the translatability and untranslatability of certain kinds of humor has still dominated most of humor translation research.As the study of translation goes deeper and more comprehensive, translation theorists begin to realize that traditional linguistic translation theories are increasingly incompetent. It was. under such circumstances that German scholars put forward the functionalist approach to translation as a great breakthrough and an important complement to traditional theories. It has opened up a new perspective and become increasingly popular in the contemporary translation studies. From the perspective of German functionalism, translating is considered as a purposeful activity, focusing on the function or functions that the translation tends to achieve. The functionalist approach to translation is represented by Hans J. Vermeer's "Skopos Theory", a theory that applies the notion "skopos" (Greek word for "purpose") to translation.In the Skopos theory, the translator's subjectivity is emphasized and he/she is entitled to choose some unconventional but appropriate translation strategies to achieve the intended purpose of translation. The status of the original text and the determinacy of meaning are redefined. The original text is no longer regarded as a sacred text of fixed meaning, but just as an offer of information, which must be analyzed and processed by the translator according to his/her particular purpose of translation.Functionalist translation theory, especially Skopos Theory, provides the theoretical framework to guide and examine the application of translation strategies for English verbal humor with typical examples analyzed in this thesis. The purpose of the overall translational action is the prime principle of determining any process of translation. Therefore, in translating English verbal humor, the translation strategy is feasible and successful only if it can serve the ultimate purpose of translation to elicit laughter in target language readers.