A Relevance Theoretical Approach To Verbal Humor Translation In Modern Family

Humor, as a combination of human wisdom and interest, can be seeneverywhere in our daily lives. It can not only be a way of provoking laughter, but alsoa way of relieving stress and improving interpersonal relationship. Thus in recentyears, a large amount of humor theories sprung up. They try to study humorphenomenon from different perspectives, for example, philosophy, literature,psychology, linguistic, sociology and so on.With the development of pragmatics, the humor studies from this perspectivearouse people’s interest. Due to the differences between the Western culture andChinese culture, the translation of verbal humor in source language becomes a toughtask for the translators.Under the guidance of RT, this thesis attempts to explore the interpretations ofverbal humor in sitcom Modern Family, and discuss the successful ways for verbalhumor translation so that humor in the original texts can meet the target reader’sexpectations, and as a result, amusing situations can be created for the target languageaudience.According to RT, translation is a double ostensive-inferential communication.From the process of translation, both ostension and implication should be taken intoconsideration. From ostension, the translator can infer what the speaker intends to say.Implication refers to the implied information that the audience can get from thecontext given. In other words, the translator has double roles in translation, one asreceptor of the SL, the other as communicator to TL readers. Hence, in the process oftranslating English into Chinese, the translator should first figure out where the intended humor is, and then transmit the humor into the TL.From our study, we find that Gutt’s Relevance Translation Theory has strongexplanatory power in interpretation of humor. The most remarkable point of thistheory is that Gutt recognizes that translation in essence is a process ofcommunication. He puts forward that translation involves interactions betweentranslator, language and the world. And he also claims that translation should searchfor the optimal relevance rather than the maximal relevance, which leads a newdirection for translation.From the study, the author concludes that RT can effectively explain most of theverbal humor. Both direct and indirect translation strategies can be adopted ininterpreting verbal humor, and the combination of these two approaches provides abetter strategy for creating amusing effects as the original. Therefore, in order toensure the humorous effect, it is necessary for translators to take certain flexible andappropriate means with some compensatory strategies to achieve optimal relevance.This study is composed by five parts. Chapter One is introduction, whichpresents the research objective, research ways, and the general structure of the thesis.Chapter Two is literature review. This chapter gives a brief introduction to humor andhumor studies, for example, definitions of humor, humor theories, and modernlinguistic approach to humor.. Chapter Three gives the theoretic framework of thepresent study. In chapter Four, the author applies the RT and Relevance TranslationTheory to verbal humor translation with the scripts of Modern Family as data. Besides,something about subtitling is mentioned, too Chapter Five gives the findings andimplications of the present study.