A Study On Translating Verbal Humor In English And American Films And Television Series From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As an important means of cross-cultural communication, films and television series play a more and more important role in people’s daily life. In the past couple of decades, an increasing number of foreign films and television series have been introduced to China through various ways and they make a great impact on Chinese native cultures. However, as an important way of attracting and amusing, humor in films and television series also becomes a popular topic. The translation of it becomes a hot topic among scholars with the increasing popularity of subtitle translation. Compared to humor in written text, humor in films and television series specializes in many aspects. It is characterized by a multi-semiotic constitution. Due to various constraints, such as time, space, the translation of this kind of humor is more complicated and has a more diverse set of challenges than translating humor from written texts. How to deliver humorous effects to the targeted Chinese audience within these constraints becomes a problem that needs to be solved urgently.In the framework of Relevance Theory, communication is considered as an intentional activity as well as an ostensive-inferential process. In most situations, a communicator intends to adopt the most direct and common way to express himself. However, in order to create humorous effects, the communicator intends to adopt an indirect and abnormal expression by adding the information that seems irrelevant. This indirectness will cause a momentary sense of abruptness and incongruity to audience. In order to figure out what the communicator really said, the audience needs to pay more processing efforts to acquire the more relevant information in the existing context. These extra processing efforts will always bring extra contextual effects to audience and eventually help them understand the humorous intention of communicator.According to the Relevance Theory, the translation of verbal humor is an interlingual communication, which includes two rounds of "ostensive-inferential" communication. In the first round, the translator analyzes the contextual information of ST and infers the communicative intention of the ST communicator; in the second round, the translator conveys the intention of the ST communicator according to the analysis in the first round. From this, we find that, translation is an interlingual interpretative use of ST, which is completed on the cognitive environment of TT audience and the purpose of translation is to convey the intention of ST communicator to TT audience. In order to achieve optimal relevance, translator should profoundly analyze both the intended information in ST and cognitive environment of TT audience and adopt corresponding translation strategies to create enough contextual effects for TT audience.Verbal humor in this thesis mainly refers to humorous dialogues and monologues in English and American films and television series. The thesis first classifies humor in English and American films and television series into three categories:universal humor, wordplay humor and culture-specific humor according to the feature of humor itself and the difficulty they pose to translation. Then, the thesis discusses the inner mechanism of humor from the perspective of Relevance Theory and fully confirms the powerful explanation of Relevance Theory to the production of humor. After this, the thesis applies Relevance Theory to the practice of verbal humor translation and through this application, the thesis reveals the essence of humor translation and summarizes two feasible principles:(1) the translation should keep the degrees of processing efforts paid by the TT audience similar with those paid by ST audience in the process of interpreting the humor;(2) translator should make the intentions of the ST communicators and the expectations of the TT audience meet. Finally, under the guidance of Relevance Theory and concrete principles, the thesis summarizes two common strategies for these three categories of verbal humor and dissects the corresponding translation methods:literal translation, annotation, paraphrase, substitution and re-creation in detail.Actually, as a particular expression, it’s difficult to achieve complete equivalence in verbal humor translation. So what is important for a successful translator is to realize the intention of ST communicator and convey it to TT audience by offering optimal relevance to them. In this way, the TT audience can appreciate foreign films and television series in a better way.