A Study On English Translation Of Humorous Utterances In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

People in daily communication are exposed to humor habitually. It is a reflection of people’s life attitudes,emotions and values. As an important part of language, humor pervades every corner of human society. However,few can comprehend the mystery in humor. Humor demonstrates the wits of writers and speakers but the highlyculture-embedded humor with distinct linguistic features really brings a big headache for the translators.This thesis aims at studying the semantic mechanism of humor and its translation based upon Gutt’srelevance translation theory. According to Grice’s cooperative principles in conversation theory, humor’sgeneration is found on incongruities which violate certain general rules of communication and sound absurd insemantic features. Therefore, understanding of humor requires more processing effort.In accordance with Gutt’s relevance translation theory, translation is an interpretive use of language, aimingat achieving optimal relevance. For this, readers need to spend adequate processing effort. But, people alwaysevaluate humor from its effect, so Gutt’s theory is perfect into such evaluation. As the mediator in the process ofcommunication, the translator should always attach importance to the differences between two languages andcultures, and try his or her best to find the communicative clues leading to humor in the source text, and recreatethem faithfully in the target text so as to get almost the same contextual effect as in the original language.The present thesis collects data of humorous utterances from the famous novel Fortress Besieged written byQian Zhongshu. This thesis first classifies humor into three categories, namely linguistic humor, cultural humorand general humor according to its function and generation way. Then, from the perspective of relevance theory,makes a further study to find whether the communicative clues of humor in the source text are recreatedfaithfully in the target text or not; meanwhile, from the aspects of strategy adoption, expression option andrhetoric, this thesis attempts to study whether the target text achieves the optimal relevance or not. Finally, basedupon detailed and comprehensive analyses, this thesis comes to the conclusion that translation is a kind ofpractice between languages and cultures, the optimal relevance is always the principle that should adhered to inthe translation process, and the translators should do their utmost to make the intentions by the source text authoridentical with the expectations of the target readers.