A Study On Translation Of Puns

Puns are ubiquitous items of language that express wit and humor in a concise way. From advertising slogans through to classic literary work and news headlines, we can't escape them. But the systematic attention to pun in the theoretical reflection about translation has been a fairly recent date lies in the notion of pun's untranslatability has been around for a long time. But in the early 1990s, more and more researchers admit translatability of pun, began to take the pun more seriously and put their scholarly effort in the study of this phenomenon. At the same time, no one denies that pun makes a translation problem.Here, this paper is offered as a preliminary probe into a study on pun translation through a categorically analytic approach. After defining pun, by categorizing pun into six types, the thesis analyzes its linguistic features which may cause problems in pun translation, and then puts forward five supermemes, including source-target, equivalence, untranslatability, free vs. literal translation and all writing is translating supermemes to give their conceptual content and their relationship with the general concept of the translation of puns. Drawing the conclusion that pun, as a kind of language use, say, parole, their translation is attainable, the question that remains is how to translate, which leads to the translation strategy part. As another kind of meme, translation strategies are widely used by translators and they are recognized to be standard conceptual tools in the translation world. So the author puts forward workable translation process and composes six strategies, which is a list for use in a problematic situation, a kind of tool for the translator who is thinking about a solution to the problem at hand but not a prescriptive set from which one strategy has to be chosen. It could rather be thought of as a toolbox from which one may be chosen.