Humor And Humor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This paper aims to study the semantic mechanism of humor and its translation based on Gutt's relevance translation theory. According to Grice's cooperative principles in conversation theory, humor's generation is founded on incongruities which violate certain general rules of communication and sound absurd in semantic features. Therefore, appreciation of humor requires more processing effort.In Gutt's relevance translation theory, translation is an interpretive use of language, aiming at achieving optimal relevance. That is, readers or audience can achieve optimal contextual effect after spending adequate processing effort. While people always evaluate humor from its result, so Gutt's relevance theory suits well to its analysis. It is necessary that the translator, namely, the mediator in communication, should attach importance to the differences between two languages, find out the communicative clues leading to humor in the source text, and reproduce them faithfully in the target text in order to obtain almost the same contextual effect as in the original language.The selected examples come from the famous novel Fortress Besieged written by Qian Zhongshu. This paper first makes analysis of the aesthetic features of humor, and then classifies humor into two categories according to its function and the generation way, that is, employment of various rhetorical devices. Function of humor in this novel is reflected in two aspects: caricaturing of people and revealing of social reality; three devices are mentioned: simile, pun, and hyperbole. Analysis focuses on how Qian's skillful use of language produces humor and its reproduction in the target text.Semantic mechanisms of humor in the selected practical examples, that is, the author's exquisite use of various rhetorical techniques, is analyzed in details. In the source text, incongruities occur as the fundamental factors for humor. The readers obtain the humorous effect when they spend adequate processing effort in resolving these incongruities. Furthermore, this paper makes explorations on how the translated text preserve and reproduce the communicative clues of humor in the target text faithfully. The selected instances from the translated text achieve almost the same contextual effect as the source text in terms of sentence structure, word choice and rhetorical device. But inevitably, some defects still remain. Therefore, after a detailed analysis on the semantic mechanism of humor, the paper compares these two texts in aspects of communicative clues of humor, to investigate how faithful the translated version is to the original one and what degrees of relevance are achieved in the target text. On the basis of comprehensive analysis and reasoning, this paper proposes different translated examples for those defects in order to better convey the author's informative and communicative purposes.