Pun And Its Translation

The earliest employment of puns hi literary works dates as far back as 2,000 years ago. They are still in frequent use in modern literary works such as novels, poems, speeches, prose, etc. The translation of puns has long been regarded as a hard job. When it comes to the problem of translating puns, it is often defined as "untranslatable".In this thesis, the Sociosemiotic Approach to Translation is used as the guidance to analyze and to improve the translation of puns.Engene Nida states in his book from One Language to Jtnotker (1986) that he believes this approach is the most-embracing system for the analysis of signs. He further explains this in another book Culture and Transiting (1993) that the great advantage of Sociosemiotic Approach over other approaches to interlingual communication is that it deals with all types of signs and codes, and especially with language as the most comprehensive and complex of all systems of signs which humans employ. The Sociosemiotic Approach goes out of the range of pure linguistic ones and pays much attention to other factors that also convey meaning, culture, context and other factors are taken into consideration in the process of translation.Linguistic culture is one of the five branches of culture. It includes phonology, grammar, semantics, etc. It was after a long time that a whole system of pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar and figures of speech came into being in a certain language. This attaches to the language its specific characteristics. Language difference often exists in such aspects as pronunciation, words and figures of speech. This inevitably leads to correspondent vacancy in translation between two languages. Such rhetoric devices as puns, alliteration, onomatopoeia and palindrome are difficult points in translation because of their cultural and linguistic characteristics. Pun is a witticism, involving the use of a word with more than onemeaning, or of words having the same, or nearly the same sound but different meanings. Due to the phonological or lexical vacancy between a source and target language, a pun, when translated into a target language, may not necessarily result in another pun. This explains why the translation of puns is thought of as difficult.The barrier in translation exists as long as social and cultural differences exist. We recognize this fact with no intention that we are pessimistic of the translatability of puns. One thing is for sure that there is translatability to some extent when we come across a pun that is usually considered "untranslatable". There is no source text that is absolutely untranslatable. We should try to convert untranslatability into translatability, or make compensation in translation, hi a word, the translation of puns is possible to a certain extent.Great importance should be attached to linguistic meaning, which refers to meaning built on the relation of a sign to other signs according to Sociosemiotic Approach of Translation in the translation of puns.Translation on semantic level is a necessity of which no translation is independent. The translation task of scientific writing or practical writing is usually fulfilled when translation on semantic level is done. But this is not true in some styles of writing, e.g. novel, prose and poem. The translation of the punny sense in original texts is indispensable to translation of literary works, without which it's impossible for readers to recognize the aesthetic effect in such aspects as meaning, sound, form and style. The translation may be thought of as unfaithful in conveying fully the message of the original version. The embodiment of linguistic meaning of puns is the translation on aesthetic level, without which the readers feel it hard to realize the humor, wit, satire or even complicated feelings expressed uniquely by the use of puns. A pun is no longer a pun when its linguistic meaning fails to be conveyed.There do exist some cases in which, when the original version is translated literally or directly into the target language, the same...