Comparison And Translation Between English Pun And Chinese Pun

In the world all languages have pun, which is to use a word or words to get two meanings, literal meaning and connotation meaning, to achieve humorous or sarcastic sense. It is commonly employed in both English and Chinese rhetoric.English pun, and Chinese pun as well, have experienced a long history. It has once been considered to be the superior use of language, but now it will spring to the eye or ear from formal occasions to the daily usage, from literature, such as novels, poems, plays, couplets, cross-talks, to practical writings, such as news headlines, advertisements.Pun is so widespread that it arouses great interest in linguists and translators. They have spared no efforts to classify pun in order to have a full understanding. Both English pun and Chinese pun are based on the pronunciation and semantic meaning of words and sentences. In addition, they also employ grammar and other figures of speech to achieve puns. But they do have their own features. In English pun can be made on abbreviation and the singular and plural forms of English words, which cannot be used in Chinese pun, while the allegorical pun is unique to Chinese.Since pun is deep-rooted in culture and language, there has been a heated debate as to whether or not pun is translatable. Those who think pun is untranslatable base their opinion on the fact that all words are culture-specific and each language has its peculiar grammar. Those who believe pun istranslatable point out that differences of languages may exist, but there are many similarities greater than differences, in respect of mankind's living environment, body structures and physiological needs. And there does exist the channel for message transferring. But pun is to some extent translatable, since as long as the social and culture differences exist, the barriers in translation exist.As far as translation of pun is concerned, the difficulty is how to produce the semantic, referential and pragmatic meaning in the target text. So many translators are exerting great efforts to try to convert the untranslatable elements into translatable ones. The common ways are: using pun to translate pun, using substitute, using paronym to compensate pun, using shifting, preserving both the surface meaning and underlying meaning, preserving either the surface meaning or the underlying meaning, using explanatory translation, and the last choice is adding notes.Translation is a process of loss, that is, because of the difference in Chinese and English languages and culture, sometimes the punny effect and humorous sense will be lost in the process of translation. However, this does not offer translators an excuse to stop tackling the problem, in contrast, they need to find out more and better methods to overcome this gap effectively.