An Analysis Of Humor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis attempts to explore the issue of humor translation in Fortress Besieged from theperspective of a pragmatic theory—Relevance Theory.Among the essence of human culture, humor is a special linguistic style with rich culturalinformation, and also a multi-disciplinary research topic. Nowadays, with the development ofcross-cultural communication, more and more importance has been attached to humor translation.The peculiar artistic effect of humorous discourse leads to the specialty of humor translation,which requires the translator to adopt proper translation strategies. The interpretation andproduction of humor depends a lot on the background knowledge and context shared by thecommunicators, and a good translation of humor should preserve its humorous effect as well asconvey its intended information. Humor in literary works, which is characterized by its diversityand great dependence on contexts, poses great difficulty to translators to a great extent. Thisthesis attempts to study the translation of humorous discourse in the field of cognitivepragmatics.First proposed by Sperber and Wilson in1986, Relevance Theory regards humancommunication as an intentional and purposeful activity, which is an ostensive-inferentialcognitive process. According to Relevance Theory, the process of translation is composed of twoostensive-inferential processes which involve three parties: the original author, the translator, andthe target readers. The translator acts as the “hearer” in the first process while the “speaker” inthe second one. The success of the translation is determined by the success of the twoostensive-inferential processes. As we can see from the relevance-theoretic account of translation,humor translation is an inter-lingual and inter-cultural communication involving the originalauthor, the translator and the target readers. In the practice of humor translation, the translatorinfers the communicative intention and reproduces the humorous clues of the original text toensure that the target text achieves optimal relevance and produces the same humorous effect asthe original. The concept of “humorous effect” is often used to evaluate the original andtranslated text of humorous discourse, and the production of humorous effect is closely relatedwith the cognitive context and processing effort of the target readers. Therefore, it is suitable toapply Relevance Theory to account for humor translation.In this thesis, Qian Zhongshu’s famous novel Fortress Besieged and its English version arechosen as the objects for a case study. The present study analyzes the translation of varioushumorous utterances in Fortress Besieged from the perspective of Relevance Theory. Bycombining the studies on humor translation with an emerging pragmatic theory—Relevance Theory, this thesis puts an emphasis on the production of humor in the novel and thereproduction of the humorous effect in the translated version. Specifically, with the selectedexamples of humorous utterances from the novel and its English version, this thesis focuses onhow some translated texts of humorous discourse achieve optimal relevance and produce thesame humorous effect as the original, while others are unsatisfactory due to their failure inachieving optimal relevance. Focused on humor translation from a new perspective, the presentstudy is aimed to prove that Relevance Theory has a great explanatory power on humortranslation, and it can be taken as a guiding principle in humor translation practice.Through theoretical research and case study, this thesis concludes that when translatinghumorous discourse, the translator should take into account the cognitive environment of thesource language readers and that of the target language readers in consistency with the principleof relevance. Some appropriate strategies, for example, literal translation and contextualadjustment, should be adopted in the process of translating humor in order to make the targetreaders’ expectation of the humorous effect consistent with what the original author intends toconvey. The purpose of the translated text is to faithfully reflect the humorous clues in the sourcetext to achieve translation validity, and to reproduce the original humorous effect to ensureoptimal relevance.