A Pragmatic Analysis Of Verbal Humor And Its Translating Strategies

Humor plays an important role in our everyday life. In daily communication, verbal humor not only serves to ameliorate interpersonal relations, enliven the communicative atmosphere and avoid conflicts, but it also marks its user out as a man with personal wit, good taste and sound mind. Humor turns out to be a special quality of verbal communication, and therefore the study of verbal humor is an area subjected to the scrutiny of pragmatics.This paper aims to analyze verbal humor from a pragmatic perspective, hoping to find some pragmatic factors that bear out the mechanism of humor production and understanding. The present research is to apply some of the major pragmatic theories, namely, Grice's Cooperative Principle (CP), Leech and Levinson's Politeness Principle (PP) and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory (RT) to the analysis of those factors that provide access to the understanding and appreciation of verbal humor. The paper discusses the cases where violating or observing Cooperative Principle and Politeness Maxim leads to humorous effect; and points out that according to the relevance theory, the contrast between the maximal relevance and optimal relevance is the source of humor because of the sudden change of cognitive environment.On the basis of the elaboration of the laughter-making and appreciation mechanism, this thesis tackles the translation of verbal humor from the viewpoint of relevance theory.Translation of verbal humor has been regarded as an almost insurmountable task as a result of the rhetorical and cultural factors. No consensus has been reached as to the translatability and translation strategies of verbal humor. This thesis holds that the verbal humor's unique artistic value and communicative functions not only prescribe the necessity of its translation, but also require some specific translating techniques. The verbal humor translation strategy is feasible and successful if it can convey to target readers the adequate contextual effects and elicit laughter, thus achieving the ultimate purpose of translation. And in this sense, the translation of verbal humor can be effectively interpreted and guided within the framework of relevance theory. This thesis seeks to offer an overall verbal humor translation method-the relevance-theoretic translation and systematically explore translation strategies according to the degree of translatability of each verbal humor. It is hoped that a better understanding and appreciation can be achieved with regard to reproducing the humorous effect, and that this investigation will provide insights for both researchers and translators.