Study On The CE/EC Humorous Utterances Translation Under The Skopos Theory

During the increasingly frequent cross-cultural communication worldwide, humor has been explored by more and more people as a carrier of a large number of languages and cultures. However, humorous utterance translation is able to make people with different cultural backgrounds and languages get a better share of humor. This thesis attempts to study the humorous utterances translation from the angle of Skopos theory, which provides a new angle for humor translation. At the beginning, this thesis aims to analyze the classifications, features and functions of humorous utterance. Then, the author of this thesis has found that humorous utterance translation intends to reproduce the humorous effect in the source language and takes the target readers as the core. According to Newmark's text typology, humorous utterance belongs to vocative text, which aims to make the target readers feel the same humorous effects as that in the source text.Choosing the Skopos Theory, the core of German functionalism, as the breakthrough point, this thesis makes a deep analysis of humorous utterance translation with the characteristics of highly purposeful activity, holding the principle of "the end justifies the means". What's more, the Skopos Theory includes Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule where the Skopos rule is the top-ranking one. It breaks the framework of traditional equivalence theory and aims to achieve the same translation purpose of communicative function both in the source text and the target text. To put in more specific, application of it in humorous utterance translation aims to reproduce the humorous effect and overcomes the linguistic and cultural barriers in order to make the same response for the target readers and the source readers and produce the same humorous effect in the target text and the source text. According to the general classification of humorous utterance, this thesis divides it into situational humor and language humor. This thesis aims to analyze the application of the Skopos Theory in the two classifications of humorous utterances translation from the two perspectives which are conformity and conflict between the source-text function and the target-text function. On the basis of collecting the related information, this thesis attempts to classify the situational humor into humor without certain background and humor with certain background. What's more, the conflict between the two functions is taken as the core in this thesis. Then this thesis can explore some translation strategies and reasons resulting in the conflict. The author attempts to make the classification of the situational humor and translate some examples so that it is inevitable that further discussions and studies at this aspect need to be conducted.