On The Translation Of The Pun

Puns are witticism, involving the use of a word with more than one meaning, or of words having the same, or nearly the same sound but different meanings. The use of puns and the language exchange directly leads to pun rendition that has long been regarded as a challenging task due to the phonological or lexical vacancy between a source and target language. There do exist some cases in which, when the original version is translated literally or directly into the target language, the same punny meanings are retained in the version. To retain such puns depends on the coincident correspondent in pronunciation or word meaning between two languages. The barrier in pun translation exists as long as linguistic and cultural differences exist. So it is very necessary to study puns and how to reserve the flavor and the contextual effect in the translation of puns to guide the practice. The study examines the translation of puns within the framework of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory.The thesis deals with these problems in four chapters. The emphases of the first chapter are laid on the general features of puns, namely, the definition, the classification, functions, characteristics and the differences between Chinese and English puns from the perspective of culture and linguistics.Chapter Two introduces key concepts of Relevance Theory such as stimulus, optimal relevance, principle of relevance, contextual effect and processing effort which serve as a theoretical foundation of the study. It also depicts how to translate under the guidance of Relevance Theory.Chapter Three is the main part of the thesis. In this chapter, the author does a large number of case studies under the framework of Relevance Theory. It consists of two parts. In the first part, the process in the translation is analyzed, namely, how to infer the author's intention and the meaning of puns and then how to make ostension to convey the form of puns and yield the same contextual effect in the target audience. And then, the strategies employing in the translation of puns are concluded after the objective analysis. In the second part, the emphases are laid on different methods of compensation to the translation of puns to fill up the linguistic and cultural vacancy under the guidance of Relevance Theory.In the fourth chapter, the author revolves around how to translate puns with linguistic and culture vacancy and make a comparative study on different methods used in practice. Then the author justifies the feasibility of different methods of compensation and reconsiders the nature of translation and reaches the conclusion, i.e. translation is communication in nature; traditional theories and cultural theories cannot reflect the nature of translation; the version should be most optimally relevant to the source.