An Analysis Of Humor Translation Under Relevance Translation Theory

Gutt’s Relevance Translation Theory was developed on the basis of Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory,and such concepts as “contextual assumptions”,“reasoning”,“optimal relevance”,“most relevance” and “processing effort” are useful in the analysis of humor translation.Based on the excerpt of Rich People Problems that is translated,and under the guidance of Relevance Translation Theory,this paper applies three principles in the analysis of humor translation: 1)reflect the relevance between the proposition and contextual assumptions of the source text in the translation;2)enable target readers to pay similar processing efforts as readers of the source text;3)reflect the conflict between the most relevance and the optimal relevance of the source text in the translation.This paper will analyze the translation from three aspects: universal humor,cultural humor and language humor,and discuss the difficulty of humor translation,in an effort to further improve the translation.