Humor Translation In The Theoretical Frame Of Functional Equivalence

Although humor translation is relatively young, yet important research is being done. The basic theories concerning humor translation include three sub-sections:the functional theory, the relevance theory, and the General Theory of Verbal Humor. This thesis, by virtue of English and Chinese complicated jokes, studies humor translation process in the theoretical frame of Nida's Functional Equivalence Theory (FET in short) with the benefit of Liu Naishi's Reduced Graph Model of Jokes (RGMJ in short), aiming to present one small step towards humor translation.Nida's FET is receptor-oriented. In the first place, it requires translators to interpret source language texts on both levels on linguistics and culture, afterwards, to render various alternatives with appropriate adjustments by taking measures of free translation and literal translation etc., finally, to test them respectively so as to choose the most natural target language texts nearest to the original readers'response, which apply to humor translation fairly well.Liu Naishi's RGMJ overcomes some deficiencies of traditional theories, thereby deepens the research on humor formalization, and thus explores a new way to verbal humor study, especially jokes; moreover, it provides a forceful tool for joke interpretation in source language texts. The first part of this paper is an introduction; chapter 1 presents the connotation and denotation of humor progressively by defining and classifying humor, and devotes to a general literature review of humor translation throughout history; chapter 2 and 3 explores RGMJ and FET separately with an aid of a Freud's canonical joke; chapter 4 sets a Chinese joke as an example to apply with FET and RGMJ. The fifth part summarizes all the referred major points and concludes the value and also some limitations of this thesis. A bibliography is attached to the end.