The Ancient Chinese Jokes And Joke Translation

This paper explores the issue of ancient humor and humor translation in the light of Attardo's General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH), combining with Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP).GTVH is a linguistic theory which proposes a humor mechanism consisting six parameters (SO, LM, NS, TA, LA, SI) with Script Opposition or Incongruity as its essential parameter. GTVH, incorporating with CP, provides a frame for humor analysis, and gives a further explanation of what produces humor.Grice's CP is one of the most important pragmatic principles with the task to explain the paradox between humor generation mechanism necessity of adherence to CP. CP contains four maxims that guarantee a smooth communication, while in many cases, there are failures that observe one or several maxims producing conversational implicature, not leading to the breaking down of the communication, but with special meaning, which triggers the inference of the listener. For the humorists, the perlocutionary effect as funny and laughable may be well illustrated by this. However, CP works in the context of pragmatic inference but not a universal theory for all humors, therefore, GTVH makes up for that through the six parameters. The incorporation of GTVH and CP well expose humor including its frame, mechanism, implicature, from which the readers will have a better understanding of why humor makes them happy.The data are collected from ancient Chinese jokes, the reason the author makes them as research objects is that ancient Chinese joke is a special literature type, written with classical Chinese, while less exploited today. Based on the above two theories, the author tries to examine how verbal humors are triggered and how efficient the translation is. The analysis indicates that culture overlap, over-explanation of ancient jokes and the narrative story-telling form contribute toa loss of humor appreciation. Therefore, the paper holds that the translator should take the theories as a guide for better translation that the target texts can reconstruct various humor clues as those in the original texts.