A Relevance-theoretic Account Of Humor Translation

Humor is a kind of universal and active language phenomenon as well as a cultural phenomenon. Due to the differences among nations in history, culture and language itself, people may come across many difficulties in understanding foreign humorous language. Many researches have been done by scholars from different angles, but few are under the guidance of relevance theory. This thesis adopts Gutt’s relevance-theoretic translation theory to guide the detailed analysis of humor translation in Friends.Relevance theory is proposed by Sperber and Wilson (1986) and then developed into relevance-theoretic translation theory by Gutt (1991). According to the theory, the nature of translation is an interpretive use of language and, like any other communicative activities, aims at achieving optimal relevance which allows readers to gain maximal contextual effect with minimal processing effort. It is also an inter-lingual and inferential communication which consists of two ostensive-inferential processes:the translator, as a part of communication, should first figure out the original author’s intentions, i.e. what contextual assumptions he/she wants to convey to readers; meanwhile, the translator has to take the target text readers’cognitive environment into consideration so as to determine which translation approaches the translator should adopt. This specifies the dual-inferential duties of the translator. Two translation methods are proposed:direct translation and indirect translation.There are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter One presents the status quo of humor and humor translation. The theoretical framework appears in Chapter Two, in which the main contents of relevance theory and correlative theories are introduced. Chapter Three makes a text analysis of humor in Friends:universal humor, cultural humor and linguistic humor. In Chapter Four, the concrete application of the two methods of humor translation is analyzed at length on the basis of the corpus of the humorous languages in Friends.Through the specific case study of humor translation in the American sitcom Friends, this thesis intends to prove that relevance theory is powerful in accounting for the theory and practice of translation, and to provide a new angle for the study of humorous dialog translation. It is hoped that under the guidance of relevance theory, more and better work are translated, so the optimal relevance between the target text and source text can be achieved. Therefore, people with different language and cultural background can better appreciate the humor expressed in the original works, and the cultural communication between different nations can be enhanced.