Humor And Humor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor is the essence of a language. It plays an increasingly important role in people’sdaily life. Traditionally, humor researches were mainly conducted from the perspectives ofpsychology, philosophy, and aesthetics. Until the end of the1970s, linguists began toprovide more scientific methods for humor study. Linguistic researches on humor focusedon the areas of semantics, pragmatics, cognitive linguistics and even computationallinguistics. An influential pragmatic theory which can be used in defining the workingmechanism of verbal humor is Relevance Theory put forward by Dan Sperber and DeidreWilson in1986. According to Relevance Theory, humor is regarded as a process ofcommunication.The emphasis of this thesis is the humor and humor translation in Fortress Besiegedfrom the perspective of Relevance Theory. The examples in this thesis were selected fromthe most recognized English version of Fortress Besieged, which was accomplishedthrough collaborative efforts of Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao. In the process ofanalysis, the concept of schema in Schema Theory was introduced. By case study, theauthor indicated that humor in Fortress Besieged came from the contextual effect acquiredby the readers in searching for the optimal relevance of the schemata. Since Chinese andEnglish have different linguistic and cultural backgrounds, certain schemata in Chinese areusually lost in English. The loss of schemata would lead to the loss of optimal relevance intarget readers’ cognitive environments, and inevitably lead to the loss of contextual effect.The key element in translation of verbal humor lies in the reproduction of the optimalrelevance in the target readers’ cognitive environments. Thus, the process of verbal humortranslation can be regarded as the process of searching for a high degree of resemblance ofoptimal relevance in the target language. The task of a translator is to make his translatedversion as close as the original work.