Analysis Of Similarities And Differences Of E-C Translation Of Stage Humor And Literary Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor as the “lubricant” of interpersonal relationship building is an indispensableelement in people’s daily communication and life. English linguistic features andEnglish-speaking countries’ social culture could be reflected in its own language humor.Stand-up comedy, as a carrier of laughter and culture, is an art form of stage humor,which originally from Britain and recently been popular and favored among Chineseaudience. The research on translation of stage humor has not been developing in such asystematic and in-depth way as literary humor translation research has gone. But as avulgarized way of cross-cultural communication, stage humor can be easilycomprehended or appreciated. Due to the fact that has just mentioned, the research onE-C translation of stage humor is necessary.Based on Gutt’s translation methods and supplemented with paralanguageanalyzation, this thesis compares similarities and differences of stage humor and literaryhumor and their translations under the framework of Sperber and Wilson’s relevancetheory. Data analyzed in this thesis is mainly made up of Mark Twain’s literary worksand Joe Wong’s performance in the White House.The discuss of translatability and untranslatability of humor have debated byscholars from both abroad and domestic for a long time. Based on Gutt’s translationmethod, the author insists on that humor can be translated. And this method isespecially suitable to be adopted by stage humor translation. Direct translation strategycan be adopted when dealing with the humorous utterances which linguistic featureshares many similarities in both original language and target language, on the otherhand, it could reach the maximum faithfulness of the original content and form. In othersituation indirect translation which including the witty change or use of words, phrases,or sentences and adding notes or annotations can be used to make up the differences oflinguistic features or cultural characteristics of humor utterances between original textand target text.