Relevance Theory And Humorous Utterance Translation

Humorous utterance is a common language phenomenon in human communication, while the study of humorous utterance is an interdisciplinary one and therefore involves a wide range of subjects. Many scholars have already done some extensive and thorough research into it from the aspects of psychology and sociology etc. It is also approached from the angle of semantic rhetorics. Recently, much importance has also been attached to the study of humorous utterance in the field of pragmatics. As a pragmatic theory intended for interpreting communication, Relevance Theory (RT), advanced by Sperber & Wilson, has already been applied to humor study. However, most of the research is done into the laugh-making mechanism of humorous utterance or its understanding. Nowadays, RT has begun to be used for directing translational practice. Based on the previous research on humorous utterances, the thesis attempts to study the specific case of humorous utterance translation and to further account for RT's interpretive power on both translational theory and practice, especially on humorous utterance translation, hoping to provide a new perspective for humorous utterance translation, as a result of which both translational practice and cross-cultural communication can be promoted.Studies both at broad and home suggest that RT provides a unified theoretic framework for translation because it gets the nature of translation and therefore can effectively explain all translational phenomena. A comparison made between English humorous utterances and Chinese ones shows that the similarities between them outweigh the differences. And in the framework of RT, humorous utterance translation is a special process of ostensive-inferential communication and also an interlingual interpretive use. Therefore, humorous utterances are absolutely translatable. The thesis also makes an analysis of examples of humorous utterance translation according to the two concepts of direct translation and indirect translation, which further proves that RT has a stronger interpretive power for humorous utterance translation.To conclude, humorous utterance translation has a high validity in the framework of RT. Humorous utterance translation is supposed to make the target language optimally relevant to the source language and therefore strive to make the original writer's communicative intention and the target reader's expectation meet, which can help to produce the similar humorous effect in the target language and hence improve the communicative effect in a specific environment.