A Study On The Translation Of Verbal Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

This thesis explores the issue of verbal humor translation from the perspective of Relevance Theory (hereafter shortened as RT) . As a pragmatic theory interpreting communication, Relevance theory has been applied to many fields for its strong explanatory power since it was put forward by Sperber and Wilson in 1986. It has now become a new theory guiding the pragmatic approach to translation. Research results from home and abroad show that RT provides a unified theoretical framework for translation and gives an insight into the communicative nature of translation, so it can explain different kinds of translation phenomena. Verbal humor translation as a special case in translation can also have a satisfactory account from RT.Relevance Theory views human communication as an intentional activity, and as an ostensive-inferential cognitive process. Generally, according to different communicative intentions, the speaker always inclines to express himself in a most explicit way, so as to enable the hearer to arrive at the maximal contextual effect with minimal processing effort. However, in order to achieve humorous communicative effect, the speaker intentionally presents some information which seems to be irrelevant in this contextual environment, causing a feeling of incongruity to the hearer. After noticing this seemingly irrelevant information, the hearer gradually finds out the communicative intention which optimally relevant to this contextual information, and accordingly the feeling of incongruity gives rise to a sense of humor. According to RT, translation consists of two ostensive-inferential processes, and three parries are involved: the source text author, the translator and the target text reader. In the first ostensive-inferential process, the source text author manifests his intention to the translator who perceives and infers the source text author's intention according to the contextual information of source text and the principle of relevance, and arrives at the interpretation of the source text. In this process, the translator plays the role of an audience, and the main task for him is to engage in inferential communication. In the second ostensive-inferential communication, the translator has to go ahead to convey the source text author-intended interpretation to the target text readers with the consideration of the cognitive environment, the expectation and cognitive abilities of target text readers. In turn, target text readers infer from the translation and elicit the intended interpretation of source text. Thus, the success of a translation is decided by the success of the two processes.Gutt, a representative to apply RT to translation, points out that the nature of translation is an interpretive use of language, and like any other communicative activities, aims at achieving optimal relevance.The concept of "effect", which is connected with readers' cognitive environment and the processing effort, is used frequently in the evaluation of humorous texts and their translations, so Relevance Theory becomes especially pertinent and, therefore, is applied to study the issue of humor translation. The paper holds that the translator should compare the cognitive environments of original and target readers and reconstruct various humor clues in a way that can ensure optimal relevance.Any kind of translation is a communicative activity in nature. Within the framework of RT, verbal humor translation is also an ostensive-inferential communicative activity comprising two ostensive-inferential processes and involving three texts (the original text, the schema text and the translation) and three participants (the original writer, the translator and the target readers). As an intermediary communicator, the translator should take into account both the original writer's intention and the target reader's cognitive environment, and adopt proper translation strategies to convey to the target readers the optimal relevance obtained from the original writer's ostensive communication. According to RT, the translator of verbal humor should aim to transmit the original writer's communicative intention and make the translation resemble the original interpretively.Verbal humor is a common language phenomenon in human communication, while the study of verbal humor 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 verbal humor in the field of pragmatics. As a pragmatic theory intended for interpreting communication, Relevance Theory, 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. Nowadays, RT has begun to be used for directing translational practice.Based on the previous research on verbal humor, the thesis attempts to study the specific case of verbal humor translation and to further account for RT' s interpretive power on both translational theory and practice, especially on verbal humor translation, hoping to provide a new perspective for verbal humor translation, as a result of which both translational practice and cross-cultural communication can be promoted. Studies both at home and abroad 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.To conclude, verbal humor translation has a high validity in the framework of RT. Verbal humor 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.There are six chapters in the whole thesis. Chapter One is the introduction. Significance, methods and of the study are introduced in this chapter. Chapter Two is the introduction of humor in the aspects of definition, nature and classification of humor and relative theories of humor are also introduced. Chapter Three briefly introduces the Relevance Theory and the theoretic account of verbal humor techniques. Chapter Four studies the process of verbal humor translation from the perspective of relevance theory. A framework (principles and the criterion) is put forward to explain relevance-theoretic verbal humor translation. Chapter five explores the approaches of verbal humor translation. Guided by relevance-theoretic framework of translating verbal humors into target language, the author proposes translation strategies by abundant examples. Chapter Six is the conclusion. After giving a general summary and implications of the research, the author points out limitations and makes some suggestions for further study and presents some factors to be considered in the process of research.