A Study Of Verbal Humor Ranslation From The Perspective Of Gutt's Relevance Translation Theory

Humor is a pervasive and positive human phenomenon, and has been studied from different perspectives, such as rhetorics, aesthetics, linguistics. Nowadays humor elements are frequently revealed in sitcoms, in which humorous utterances or verbal humor plays a vital role in producing humorous effects. Since English is a foreign language to Chinese audience, they are certainly faced with difficulties in understanding humor elements due to the discrepancy of such factors as culture, society, belief, linguistic features. Under this condition, it's necessary to facilitate Chinese to appreciate English verbal humor in sitcoms by means of exploring, translating and interpreting them.Relevance Theory (RT for short term) put forward by Sperber and Wilson, which is firstly employed in translation area by Gutt, and then he forms Relevance Translation Theory. Gutt points out the nature of translation is an interpretive use of language, like any other communicative activities, aims at achieving optimal relevance which allows readers to gain the largest amount of contextual effects with the least processing effort. Gutt's theory provides a new perspective for understanding human communication, which serves as a powerful explanation to humor translation which is thought untranslatable for a long time. The speaker and listener are both relevance-oriented, and communication itself is an ostensive-reference process. It is the same with verbal humor in sitcoms.Under the guidance of Gutt's theory, the author firstly introduces Relevance Theory and a few essential concepts of Gutt's theory in translation, such as the inferential nature of communication, interpretive use of language, and communicative clues. Then, under the guidance of Gutt's theory, translation can be regarded as a double ostensive-inferential process and a context-based activity, furthermore in the process translators are required to infer as well as manifest optimal relevance.The translation of verbal humor in subtitles will also be studied from the perspective of Gutt's theory. Subtitle, as a carrier of humor in sitcoms, influence the practical translation for its distinctive features. Direct translation and indirect translation approaches put forward by Gutt are adopted in this thesis. Since Gutt never puts forward specific translation methods, the author analyzes corpus from Everybody Loves Raymond to makes efforts to find suitable specific methods for humor translation under the guidance of Gutt's theory.Through the study, it can be found that Gutt's Relevance Translation Theory can effectively explain verbal humor translation from cognitive aspect. Under the guidance of direct and indirect translation approaches, the author attempts to find optimum translation methods, such as literal translation, annotation, substitution, recreation. Actually the thesis looks forward to throwing some light on translators and to making certain contributions to the study of this area.