A Pragmatic Analysis Of The Failure In Humor Translation From English Into Chinese

One of the biggest obstacles in the cross-cultural exchange is the differences of language and culture. Humor is, in any language, a quite unique literary genre, employing certain rhetoric devices to achieve its effects. So problems come along with the translation of humor.This paper aims at analyzing humor lost in translation from a pragmatic perspective, hoping to find some pragmatic guidelines to tackle the failure in humor understanding and translation. The research is to apply some of the major pragmatic theories, namely, Grice's Cooperative Principle, Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory and Krashen's Input Hypoarticle theory to the analysis of what factors have an influence on the comprehension and translation of humorous texts. The author of this paper adopts quantitative and qualitative approaches. Data are collected through personal interviews with and questionnaires distributed among altogether 82 third-year English majors from the two classes that the author is teaching.The paper is divided into five chapters. Chapters One and Two serve as a general survey of humor and pragmatic theories related to humor at home and abroad, and review of the definition and characteristics of English and Chinese humor. Chapter Three is to focus on research methodology and data collection through questionnaires and interviews. In Chapters Four and Five, detailed analysis and conclusion are made.The author of this paper, following the relevance theory, focuses on the analysis of language difference that causes the failure of humor translation and puts forward the suggestion that translators should consider the acceptability of its Chinese readers; therefore, the translator ought to optimize the dissimilated target language, so that the essence of humor in the source text can be retained and appreciated in the target language.The originality of this paper lies in a pioneering attempt to present an optimalrelevance approach for the comprehension and translation of English humor. It alsooffers suggestions on proper application of translation practice. The paper attempts to:(1) answer the research question: What cause the loss of humor in the translation from English into Chinese?(2) gather suitable and sufficient data to verify the following assumptions:Assumption 1: The optimal relevance, in a broader sense, is the basis in the concept of the translation theories?Assumption 2: The optimal relevance approach is a breaking-point to avoid the failure in the translation of English humor into Chinese.The results show that language competence and level of cultural knowledge affect the subjects' understanding and interpretation of humor. Besides, context that provides clues for comprehension and interpretation is a solid theoretical ground for optimal relevant approach proposed by the author of this paper. Translation theories, though varying from terms to aspects of different studies, enjoy the basis of the optimal relevance as defined in a broader sense by the writer of the dissertation, so it helps paving a way for the answer to the third question: the optimal relevant approach is a breaking-point to avoid the failure in the translation of English humor into Chinese.This paper may be of some help to further the theoretical researches in the understanding and interpreting of verbal humor, as well as to test the hypotheses drawn from the interpretation of humor language in cross-cultural communications. It is a pity that the number of the subjects is limited, and their English level is not very typically universal of the national level of English majors at college, so the results of the case study can only be of a significance of translation teaching practice in a limited region. In addition, the optimal relevance approach in translation proposed by the author is far from being anything theoretical; it is the author's idea, a starting point for a separate subject to be further studied in the future.