Cultural Default In Verbal Humor Translation From The View Of Relevance Theory

Humor is itself entertaining and relaxing, however, to study it requires painstaking efforts. Humor studies have been carried out for centuries through various angles. Three traditional theories of humor, i.e. superiority/disparagement theory, incongruity theory and relief theory, each implies the importance of context to humor appreciation.Humor, especially verbal humor is language-specific and culture-specific. The specific information that is well-known to natives often becomes default information. It can be easily retrieved by natives but becomes an obstacle to humor appreciation for target language readers if it remains default in translation. So the task of the translator is to reconstruct cultural defaults and solve cultural barriers for humor appreciation, thus recreate humorous effects.Relevance theory is first put forward by Dan Sperber and Dierdre Wilson. Relevance theory provides a sound explanation for the balance between processing effort and cognitive effect, which accounts for humor appreciation, cultural default and translation. The addressee is willing to spend more cognitive effort to achieve the more covert interpretation in pursuit of extra effect, i.e. humor. The addresser tries his best to save the addressee's cognitive effort, which results in cultural default. The addresser always tries to save the addressee's cognitive effort which makes default inevitable. Thus the translator doesn't have to translate humor strictly in the semantically faithful way. The translator just needs to achieve similar humorous effect. Then the author proposes several ways to deal with cultural default in humor translation.