On Translating Chinese Humorous Texts From The General Theory Of Verbal Humor

As a very common phenomenon in our society, humor can create joyful atmosphere and ease pressure in our daily life. The research of humor is a subject of multiple disciplines, involving psychology, philosophy, literature, linguistics and so on. This paper is conducted from the perspective of the General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH)(Attardo & Raskin 1991; Attardo 1994, 2001) and the Extended Theory of the GTVH(Ge Lingling & He Yuanjian 2012: 35-44). The corpus of this paper is systematically selected from Lu Xun’s Gushi Xinbian and Yang Xianyi, Gladys Yang’s Old Tales Retold with the sentence of texts as its basic unit. With its Chinese-English bilingual parallel corpus, this paper aims to investigate the features of humor in the texts and also explore how to realize the maximization of humor from Chinese humorous texts to its English version.From the comparative analysis of 258 pieces of humor in Gushi Xinbian and its English version, it is found that first the humor in Gushi Xinbian and Old Tales Retold is mainly triggered by rhetorical devices which belong to the narrative strategy in the GTVH, which accounts for 94.57%, 77.52%, and a total number of 22 rhetorical devices are used in the text, including personification, simile, hyperbole etc, among which simile is used 80 times, accounting for the largest proportion. Second, there are five translation methods, namely: literal translation, substitution, omission, paraphrase and synthesization, and three transformation forms, namely: homo-transformation, hetero-transformation and zero transformation used in translating humor into the target language, reserving 77.52% of humor from the source language. Third, the SO in the source language is reserved in the target language to realize the maximization of humor.