Functionalist Approaches To The Humor Translation In Mark Twain's Works

Whether in social life or in literature works,humor ranks highly.In the west,humor has penetrated into every field of the society.A man without a sense of humor not only suffers himself,but also turns others off.F.Cole wrote in New York Daily News on July 4th,1976 that "American men would rather admit that they committed treason,murder or arson and wore false teeth or hair than admit that they lack a sense of humor"(Jiang,2001),which shows that humor weighs heavily on Americans' minds and reflects a striking characteristic of American humor——exaggeration.With the rapid development of the world economy and culture,it is inevitable to translate humor in intercultural communication,yet the translatability of humor has long been in the highlight of translation studies. American writer Issac Bashevis Singer said that "poetry and humor could hardly b(?)ranslatable"(?)n&Wen,2(?)03).Despite all the difflculties in humo(?) translation,many scholars and translators are still working on it continuously.Previous studies on humor translation,mainly based on the equivalence theory,focus on how to fulfill the "laughter-making" function of a humorous text,which is taken to be its aesthetic function in this thesis,and tend to ignore that the "laughter-making" function or the aesthetic function is not the only function of a humorous text.Maybe arousing amusement is the only purpose of some humor in our daily life,then "laughter-making" should be its main function,and the chief task of translation is to transfer its humorous elements to let the target-text readers feel its aestheticism.But some humor doesn't only intend to amuse the listeners or the readers,but to expose a deep content in a relaxed way,thus the informative function should be its main function,so the first task in translation is to transfer its information,and then its humorous elements.This thesis tries to show that humor is translatable,while the question is to what extent it is translatable.The author,under the guidance of the functionalist theories,takes the humor translation in the works of American famous writer Mark Twain as examples to show that there are different translation approaches to different kinds of humor,and translators should try to maintain the humor in the source text while transferring its information,but sometimes we may have to sacrifice some of its humor to transfer its information because of cultural difference or other reasons(e.g.the main funstion or purpose of the targe(?) text).The thesis divides humor into verbal humor and non-verbal humor,and discusses the translation of verbal humor,then further divides verbal humor into universal humor,cultural humor,and linguistic humor.To the three different kinds of humor,the author suggests adopting different translation approaches:relatively speaking.,the translation of universal humor is easy,and we can adopt literal translation;the translation of cultural humor is more difficult,and the translation of linguistic humor is the most difficult,and to these two kinds of humor,the author suggests adopting the strategy of compensation or domestication.And there are some special cases,under the premise of transferring information,some humorous source texts are translated into non-humorous target texts and some non-humorous source texts are translated into humorous target texts.In short,the most important point is that adopting different translation approaches according to different purposes or functions of the target texts and the comprehensive ability of the expected target text readers.