Puns And Their Translation From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Puns can be found in nearly all languages, while each language has its specific characteristics of pronunciation , vocabulary , grammar and figures of speech. These existing language differences inevitably lead to correspondent vacancy between two languages. Usually, while the original pragmatic meaning can be conveyed in the target language, the linguistic meaning cannot be retained during the translation process, or vice versa. That is to say, pun is hard to transfer from one language to another because of different specific language characteristics.As a matter of fact, previous attempts at puns translation were almost semantic approaches. It is well known that semantics focuses on linguistic expressions. It neglects the cognitive environments and is much concerned with the mere transplantation of words and the recovery of grammatical structures. It studies sentences as units of the abstract linguistic system and regards sentences as stable products. Problems in the semantic approach forced linguists to find some alternative solutions. The one seems most promising is the pragmatic approach.Pragmatics goes beyond the bounds of pure linguistics and pays much attention to the factors that convey meaning, culture and context. And Relevance Theory, as a newly developed inferential approach to pragmatics which attempts to give an explicit account of how the information-processing faculties of our mind enable us to communicate with one another, is used as the guidance to analyze the understanding of puns. Relevance is the result of the optimal balance between cognitive effects and processing efforts. In simple terms, extra contextual effects will offset any extra processing effort required to understand an utterance. So Relevance Theory provides a unified theoretical framework with its optimal relevance and interpretive resemblance and offers a chance of better understanding before interpretation. Well understanding of puns will sufficiently improve the translation of puns. And some effective rules and methods within the perspective of pragmatics, such as: embodiment of the linguistic meaning of puns; conveyance of referential meaning or pragmatic meaning...