On The Translation Of Chinese Humorous Texts

Humor, as a linguistic phenomenon, are frequently adopted to easily engage in our social interactions for taking away that awkward, uncomfortable, or uneasy feeling of social interactions. Since humor has been great importance to our daily lives, many researches have been done from a variety of perspectives, such as philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, film, literature and so on. Despite large numbers of scholars have participated in the study, this topic is proved incredibly difficult due to the different definitions domains of verbal humor. Moreover, it has created the difficulty to verbal humor translation when there is a close relation between verbal humor and the culture behind it.Within the framework of the General Theory of Verbal Humor (the GTVH) proposed by Attardo and Raskin, and the Extended Theory of the GTVH by Ge Lingling, a tentative study has been done to analyze the humorous texts from the novel Mao Cheng Ji by Lao She and its English Version Cat Country by William A. Lyell based on a Chinese-English bilingual database.The major findings are shown as follows:the frequently used rhetorical devices, irony and simile, are the main triggers of verbal humor in the source text; the English version Cat Country is a successful one that the majority of the humorous texts in the source text have been preserved in the target text; literal translation and free translation are the most used methods, while substitution and synthesization are the most effective ones; there are three transformation models of rhetorical devices in the target text:transformation with the same device, transformation with other devices and transformation with no device.The findings show that the GTVH and its Extended Theory indeed have provided a systematical methodology and theoretical guidance to the translation of Chinese humorous texts. During the translation process of humorous texts from the source text to the target text, six parameters are playing a significant role, particularly the scripts opposition and rhetorical devices. Therefore, the preservation of six parameters to the utmost in the target text should be taken into first consideration for the future verbal humor translation.