Cooperative Principle And Humor Translation

Along with the increasingly frequent cross-cultural communication in the world, more and more foreign movies and TV plays are shown on the screen in China. As a special audiovisual genre, English sitcom is featured by humor. Undoubtedly, the translation of humor plays a decisive role in creating the desired effect of the comedy in target language audience. However, it has rarely been systematically studied as a specific translation problem. So it does have practical significance for us to study the phenomenon of humor and its translation.The translation of humor is a challenging task, which really tests a translator's ability and creativity. It is necessary to combine humor translation with other disciplines. The present thesis is written for the purpose of introducing a pragmatic mechanism into the humor translating process, exactly, to make maximum application of the Cooperative Principle (CP) both in the decoding phase and in the reproduction phase in order to realize pragmatic equivalence in humor translation.Firstly, it applies Cooperative Principle to expound the generating mechanism of verbal humor and discusses the cases where violation of four maxims of CP leads to humorous effect. Then, subtitling, one of audiovisual translation, is chosen as the focus of the study and the applicability of CP to subtitle translation is analyzed. CP is employed to advocate that translation should cover the features of adequacy, accuracy, closeness and acceptability. Finally, the overall translation principle—pragmatic equivalence is generalized to guide humor translation in the quest of realizing the analogously humorous effect in the target audience and specific strategies the translator has adopted when translating humor in Friends are analyzed.CP is proved to be powerful in accounting for humor translation. The great contribution of the CP in humor translation lies in its great power to direct people to discover the implicit meaning, which can hardly be inferred only through the literal meaning. It is helpful for the translator to have a rational way to acquire the speaker's intention in his words so as to realize the pragmatic equivalence. This theory can also give the translator a better understanding of their roles in the translation process. So they can adjust their commonly-used translation strategies in order to make the communication more successful.It is hoped that a better understanding and reproduction can be achieved with regard to the humorous effect, and that this investigation will provide insights for both researchers and translators.