On Humor Translation From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

This thesis takes the translation of the famous American sitcom Two and a Half Men as the case to explore the feasibility of Grice’s Cooperative Principle to humor translation, aimed at providing a new perspective to the study of the generation mechanism of humor and humor translation.Situation comedy, based on the prototype of the real life, is an amusing television drama series with a set of characters. It provides numerous amusing contexts and is also the perfect carrier of verbal humor. Nowadays, the popularity of sitcoms has provided sufficient materials for the pragmatic study of the translation of verbal humor. Two and a Half Men is a typical American sitcom. Its witty and humorous language style as well as its amusing contexts makes it the ideal studying object of this thesis.Cooperative Principle, first proposed by Paul Grice, is used to guide people’s conversational activities. It has four maxims, namely the maxim of quantity, quality, relation and manner. According to Grice, people have to abide by the four maxims of Cooperative Principle, in order to ensure the effective exchange of information in conversation. However, humor is usually generated by the violation of one or two maxims, which may produce effects such as irony, exaggeration, etc. Grice’s Cooperative Principle is also applicable to the translation of verbal humor, as translation can also be viewed as a special kind of conversation between the readers of the target text and author of the source text with the help of the translator. The aim of the conversation is to make the source text understood by the target readers. The translator, as the bridge between the author and the readers, assumes the responsibility of transmitting the author’s real intention to the readers. To ensure the smoothness of the conversation, the translator first has to cooperate with the author and try to get a thorough understanding of the ST, and then cooperates with the readers of the TT to covey accurately the author’s intention to the readers..From the case study of the verbal humor translation in Two and a Half Men, it is concluded that Cooperative Principle has great applicability in both the generation and the translation of verbal humor.