English Humor Translation

With the development of international communication and the translation, the humor translation gains more and more attention from the translation theorists and translators. But because there are too many cultural and linguistic barriers involved, the comprehension and translation of English humor are always headaches for the Chinese reader and translator. Actually, although people are annoyed by the difficulties in comprehending and translating humor, there are still some drivers, the bases for humor translation, in humor translation. What's more, until now what role does each barrier play in humor translation and what translation strategies and techniques should be taken has never been studied systematically. This dissertation explores the drivers and barriers and their roles in humor comprehension and translation, and presents the possible translation strategies and techniques on how to deal with the barriers in humor translation. The research methods consisted of a wide review of relevant literature on humor and humor translation, coupled with the collection and analysis of empirical data. The latter is based on two questionnaire texts of a class from Shandong Foreign Trade Vocational College in the Qingdao. The findings from this research show that the pure logic-related English humor is the easiest to comprehend and translate; and the pure linguistic barriers is easier to overcome than the pure cultural barrier in English humor compression; that the extent of difficulty in comprehension of humor doesn't represent the extent of difficulty in translation; that the culture-related humor and language-related humor requires the different translation strategies.