Humor And Translation

Humor both in the West and the East has been a longstanding and eternal topic. It is a valuable heritage of human being and unique to human being as well. As a saying goes"for someone with two legs and a sense of humor, if he or she is destined to lose one of the two, the one would rather be lost ought to be a leg."(Hu Fanzhu, 1987 : 1) From this, we can tell what an important and indispensable role humor plays in the mental heritage of mankind. Humor has been explored, studied, applied, and enjoyed by more and more people. During the increasingly frequent cross-cultural communication worldwide, translation of humor should not be neglected, for humor itself is a cultural-bound item besides its universality. In order to make humor understandable to people from different communities, translation would be of great help. However, in dealing with humor unique to a certain culture, the difficulty is almost insurmountable for translators. Due to this fact, lots of mistranslations have long been in existence.Through a survey of the previous studies on humor and translation, the author of the thesis has found that"non-translatability of humor"is the dominating idea in this area. Yet with the advancement of translation theories as well as the non-stop effort made by numerous scholars and translators, functionalist translation method has been introduced into the translation of humors. Compared with the views of traditional translation theories, functionalist translation is indeed a relatively new perspective and proved to be successful, especially in translating jokes and funny lines from movies etc., functioning merely as laughter articulation. However, functionalist translation method may be less workable in translating humorous expressions in the novel Fortress Besieged (Weicheng), which is also concerned in the paper.Fortress Besieged is the masterpiece of Qian Zhongshu. It has been regarded as the funniest and elaborated-written novel in the history of modern Chinese literature, probably is the greatest one. (Zhang Quan, 1991 : 38)"Professor Xia Zhiqing has also highly praised the novel's comic exuberance and satire."(Jeanne Kelly &...