| Translation of humor has always been a difficult problem. At the beginning, studies on humor were conducted from the perspectives of aesthetics, philosopy, and psycology and so on. Later, essays and reports on translation of humor emerged yet most of them were about humor in comedies. Scholars paid little attention to humor in other text types.Humor is the soul of comedy so the top priority goes to recreation of humor when translating a comedy. Though not of equal importance as in a comedy, humor in other types of texts is not dispensable because it mirrors the writer’s writing style, and thus translators should be careful with it. To translate it properly, translators need to firstly distinguish its function and importance, and to decide whether to retain or abnegate it when recreating humor conflicts delievering information. In other words, translators need to analyze the text.German functional translation theories were famous for studies about text analysis. Christiane Nord proposed methods and a model for translation-oriented text analysis, which required translators to analyze external and internal factors of a text, including the anticipated goals, target readers, time and location of reception, and other factors, so as to determine the translatability of the text, the functions that need to be retained and plots that need to be adapted, and finally to pick an effective translation strategy.The author adopts Nord’s method of text analysis as a reference when dealing with the humorous sentences in Adventures in Stationery, which is a book of social science, not a comedy. Its wording, however, is witty and jocular. So the author analyzes the verbal and non-verbal humor through text analysis model when translating all the humorous sentences. During the process, the author finds out that analyzing external elements of a text can help the translator more, while the function of analysis of internal elements is limited when translting non-verbal humor. |
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