Translating Humor From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

The paper discusses humor and humor translation from the perspectives of Speech Act Theory and the Script Opposition Theory of General Theory of Verbal Humor (GTVH).On the one hand, Speech Act Theory which consists of three parts (locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act) concentrates on how to do things with words. As a type of special speech event in communication, humor ought to accomplish both the tasks of illocutionary act and perlocutionary act of amusement. As to humor translation, how to amuse people with words in another language can also be explained by speech act theory from the three aspects. However, Speech Act Theory is too abstract in dealing with the practical humor translation. On the other hand, the Script Opposition Theory of GTVH has provided us with a more practical tool to analyze humor and humor translation. Furthermore, its contribution to humor translation is that it has also provided us with a good standard of joke similarity, which is very helpful for a translator to evaluate how much a piece of translated humorous words differs from the source one. As a result, after combining Speech Act Theory and the Script Opposition Theory, I will try to explore what light Speech Act Theory can shed on humor translation and how it can work successfully with the GTVH of humor translation.In chapter one, I am going to make a brief introduction to this paper. Chapter two is the part of literature review which will discuss the findings of the scholars studying in this field. Chapter three to chapter five will be the most important part of this paper. In chapter three, which is the theoretical framework of the paper, I intend to explain humor translation with Speech Act Theory of Amusement from the perspectives of locutionary act, illocutionary force, and perlocutionary effect of amusement. Since Speech Act Theory is merely able to provide us with a tool to explain and guide humor translation, I also introduce the Script Opposition Theory in order to make my study of humor translation more feasible in real translation. In chapter four, I will combine Speech Act Theory of Amusement and Script Opposition Theory together and explore the inner relationship between them in understanding humor and humor translation. In order to make my study more reasonable and persuasive, I would like to illustrate my point by analyzing some of Mark Twain's short stories in chapter five. Chapter six is the conclusion of the whole paper。...