The Study Of Humor And Humor Translation From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis explores the issue of humor and humor translation from the perspective of Relevance Theory.Relevance Theory views human communication as an intentional activity, and as an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. Generally, according to different communicative intentions, the speaker always inclines to express himself in a most explicit way, so as to enable the hearer to arrive at the maximal contextual effect with minimal processing effort. However, in order to achieve humorous communicative effect, the speaker intentionally presents some information which seems to be irrelevant in this contextual environment, causing a feeling of incongruity to the hearer. After noticing this seemingly irrelevant information, the hearer gradually finds out the communicative intention which optimally relevant to this contextual information, and accordingly the feeling of incongruity gives rise to a sense of humor.According to Relevance Theory, translation consists of two ostensive-inferential processes, and three parties are involved: the source text author, the translator and the target text reader. In the first ostensive-inferential process, the source text author manifests his intention to the translator who perceives and infers the source text author's intention according to the contextual information of source text and the principle of relevance, and arrives at the interpretation of the source text. In this process, the translator plays the role of an audience, and the main task for him is to engage in inferential communication.In the second ostensive-inferential communication, the translator has to go ahead to convey the source text author-intended interpretation to the target text readers with the consideration of the cognitive environment, the expectation and cognitive abilities of target text readers. In turn, target text readers infer from the...