A Chinese Translation Study Of Humor In Woody Allen’s Essays

This thesis is a research on the translation of humor. On the analysis of the humorous articles of Woody Allen, the renowned American director and the comparison between Li Bohong’s and Sun Zhongxu’s Chinese versions, this thesis is to study the methods to represent humor in the translated text. It not only focuses on Woody Allen’s unique way of writing, but also on how the Chinese version can represent his motivation for expression, techniques to amuse readers and the features of his humorous articles.The first chapter focuses on the "causes" of humorous articles, namely the motivation to create humor. It discusses how to convey Woody Allen’s state of mind in the Chinese versions. This chapter consists of three sections, discussing how to represent the writer’s superiority, hostility and eagerness to achieve higher social status mainly from the perspective of to what extent the writer hiding his state of mind.The second chapter focuses on the process of creating humor, namely, the techniques to amuse readers. It consists of four sections, discussing how the Chinese version can represent the techniques of establishing antithetic frameworks, establishing compound schema, creating turn-round track and deliberately violating pragmatics rules. It touches on the use of adverbs and conjunctions, serious-versus-bantering tone and the creation of new ways of expression.The third chapter focuses on the "effects" of humorous articles, namely, their features. It consists of three sections, discussing the tacitness. compositionality and emotional valuation of the humorous articles in the Chinese translations.Based on the above analysis, this thesis reaches the conclusion that the three stages of creating humor in the articles can serve as three dimensions from which the decision-making process of translation can obtain reference. When conveying the writer’s state of mind, the translator should take into account the distance between the writer’s mind and his text, making proper disguise. When representing techniques of humor, the translator should first identify what techniques have been used and what the amusing mechanism is. then select certain translating method according to the techniques used. When representing the features of humorous articles, based on the first two chapters, the translator should take into consideration what the final communicative purpose the article wants to achieve. This thesis hopes that through the above three-step process of thinking, the humorous effects can be represented in the translated text to the greatest extent. Hopefully this thesis can provide useful reference for the translation of humor, thus propelling the spreading and development of classic humorous works.