A Research On Humor Translation Of Fortress Besieged From Functionalist Translation Approach

Humor has received wide attention in literature since ancient times whetherinChina or in western countries. Humor not only brings happiness to people but alsoplays an important role in culture transmission. To meet readers’ thirst forappreciating western culture, translation works of western literature keep cropping upmassively. Academic circle has been highlighting the translation of humor,however, itdevelops rather slow due to its complexity.Against the prevailing opinion that humor is untranslatable, thefunctionalisttranslation theory and especially its core theory—the skopostheoriepoints out that translation is an activity with certain purposes, which means thetranslator translates with a specific purpose. The translator should decide on thetranslation techniques, styles and expressions based on the purpose of the translation.Functionalist translation theory emphasizes that translators should be unshackled fromthe source text and play their subjectivity. Being different from traditional translationtheory in nature, functionalist translation theory has blazed a new trail for translationof humor.This thesis choosesQianZhongshu’s novel Fortress Besieged and its sole Englishversion to do a case study, in which the translation of classical humorousexamplesselected from the novel are analyzed in the perspective of the functionalisttranslation theory. The author adopts the quantitative and qualitative method in thecase study and classifies the humor in Fortress Besieged into three kinds: commonhumor, cultural humor and linguistic humor. After analyzing numerous examples ofthe three kinds of humor, the author finds out that in quite a number of casesthehumorous effect fails to be fully represented or even totally lost in the target languagedue to the translators’ undue adherence to the source text or their adoption ofinappropriate translation methods. Thereby the English version fails to fulfill thetranslation purpose of presenting the original flavor of humor in the novel and theunique writing features of QianZhongshu. Therefore, the English version is reckonedunsuccessful.