A Sociosemiotic Approach To The Humor Translation In Zhang Wanli’s Version Of The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn

With the increasingly close contacts between the countries, humor plays a moreand more important role in the people’s communication. Therefore, it seems to beparticularly necessary to conduct the study on humor translation. Previous researchershave made some researches on humor translation, but nearly none of them couldpresent a general translation criterion under which both the humorous message and thehumorous effect can be conveyed perfectly.Sociosemiotics claims that the world is composed of different kinds of signs.Translating is translating meaning, and also the transference of sign meaning. Thereare three kinds of sign meaning: designative meaning, linguistic meaning andpragmatic meaning. Based on the studies on sociosemiotics, the sociosemiotictranslation criterion was proposed which is “correspondence in meaning and similarityin function”. Therefore, for the humor translation in Mark Twain’s The Adventures ofHuckleberry Finn, translators need to give equal attention to its three meanings as wellas its linguistic functions. By that, it is possible for translators to achieve“correspondence in meaning and similarity in function” from all levels. This thesisadopts the theory-driven and translation-practice-driven research methods. From theperspective of sociosemiotic approach, the author analyzes Zhang Wanli’s humortranslation in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.Through the analysis, the author gives the transference way of humor’s threemeanings and concludes translation methods of humor in the light of sociosemioticapproach. For humor’s transference of designative meaning, the author analyzes therelation between humor signs and what signs refer to in the source text and target text.In order to realize the equivalence of designative meaning, Zhang adopts literal andfree translation and strategies of domestication and foreignization. Because linguisticmeaning refers to the internal sign relation, the author analyzes the linguistictransference of humor from phonetic level, lexical level, syntactical level anddiscourse level. Equivalence of linguistic meaning is realized through equivalence ofsign relation at these levels in the source text and target text. Literal translation andfree translation are mainly adopted by Zhang to realize linguistic equivalence of humor.Transference of pragmatic meaning of humor is realized from transference of symbolicmeaning, expressive meaning and associative meaning which reflect speakers’ realintention. Literal translation, free translation and annotation are adopted by Zhang. Through the analysis, the author considers that Zhang’s meaning translation of humorin The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn realizes equivalence transference whichconforms to the sociosemiotic translation criterion of “correspondence in meaning”.The author analyzes Zhang’s humorous function and translation style, concluding thatZhang’s style of humor translation is colloquial and informal and the humorousfunctions in his translation are similar to those in the source text.The author hopes to provide a more comprehensive, practical and effective wayfor future humor translation and other kinds of text’s translation by applying thesociosemiotic approach to translation and meanwhile make humor better serveinternational communication. However, due to the author’s limited access to the sourcematerial, an incisive and thorough understanding of sociosemiotic theory and dialectsin the novel may not be reached. The author hopes these limitations can be made upwith scholars’ unceasing research.