A Tentative Exploration On The Dynamics Of Context Adaptation In Humor Translation

Humor is everywhere in our daily life. In daily communication, humor ameliorates personal relations, improves communicative atmosphere, but also is endowed with the symbol of personal wit, glamour and education. However, translation of humorous language has been regarded despairing as a result of the differences in logics, rhetoric and culture of source and target languages. This thesis thus takes a pragmatic perspective on the investigation of how these factors individually or collectively work in humor translation, claiming that translation is a dynamic choice-making process with the aim of achieving adaptability in terms of linguistic reality and contextual correlates.Jef Verschueren, Secretary-General of International Pragmatics Association, puts forward a theory of adaptation which is used to understand and explain pragmatics from a new perspective in Understanding Pragmatics. Moreover, he proposes that pragmatics is actually a perspective on language. Dynamics of adaptability is the centre in the theory of adaptation which means the dynamic generation of meaning in language use, and dynamics of adaptability can be embodied from three particularly salient factors: (1) The temporal dimension: Production and interpretation of language will change according to the different time. As a contextual relevant part of the adaptation theory, time factors usually bring some constrains to the language interaction. Furthermore, the result of dynamic adaptation due to the time factors will cause the development of language itself. (2) Dynamics and context: Context is dynamic, including language user, mental world, social world, physical world, and linguistic context; (3) Dynamics and structure: The utterer and interpreter can move back and forth along the basically linear dimension at any stage in the process of meaning generation according to their own communication objects. Hence this research attempts to apply Verschueren's adaptation theory into the study of humor transference, which offers us a good perspective to formulate this adaptability framework of translation to investigate the work of the various elements individually or collectively, trying to establish a coherent and unified approach for the translation of humor.To be exactly, this thesis is divided into three chapters:Introduction illustrates the background, the objectives and the structure of the thesis generally.Chapter 1 briefly introduces the basic ideas and concepts of humor including various definitions of humor and some of its classifications and further reviews some studies on the translation of humor. It also introduces the three major categories of conventional humor theories including Superiority Theory, Relief Theory and Incongruity Theory. Besides, the laughter-eliciting mechanism is also mentioned here.Chapter 2 deals with Verschueren's Adaptation Theory. The beginning part is the brief illustration of this theory. Some important notions are given: variability, negotiability, adaptability and the relationship of the three characteristics; four angles of pragmatic investigation, and the relationship of them. Since Verschueren's theory of adaptation is from the perspective of pragmatics, the applicability of adaptation theory into translation is discussed in this chapter. Then, the author further analyzes the there principles of the humor translation under the adaptability: the temporal dimension; dynamics and context; dynamics and structures.In chapter 3, an adaptation-theoretic perspective on non-linguistic context and linguistic context in humor translation is discussed in details. It first illustrates the limitations on translatability of humorous language and its translatability to highlight the dynamic role of context in language production and interpretation. Then, in order to facilitate further analysis of the thesis, the author analyses the function of context adaptation in translating humor. Furthermore, the author holds that the translation of humor in essence represents a continuous making of choices ranging from selection of the source text to specific techniques employed to achieve a desired purpose. To obtain optimum translation effect, translators should make various choices linguistically and extra-linguistically to adapt to the target text, such as the strategy of dynamic context adaptation.In conclusion, the author concludes the whole thesis by summarizing the key ideas of the thesis, highlighting its possible contributions to the linguistic research of humor and its limitations and also welcomes a further investigation in this field.