The Translation Of Black Humour Expressions In Political Novels From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

This report is based on the E-C translation of Peacekeeping,a political novel written by American writer Mischa Berlinski.He shaped his three-year life in Haiti into this novel as social settings.It tells us a story about an American peacekeeping police officer---Terry White.Terry works together with Haitian judge,Johel to fight against the brutal,corrupt Haitian bureaucrats and try to relieve the oppressed people from suffering.The author employs black humour expressions to criticize the brutal Haitian bureaucrats and some hypocritical foreign peacekeepers.Then he shows his sympathy for the poor Haitian people.The sarcastic linguistic style is what makes this novel outstanding,but it also brings difficulties and challenges to translators.From the perspective of Skopos theory,this report analyzes the author's linguistic style and finds out that black humour is presented by means of two vehicles:irony and illogical expressions.In Peacekeeping,irony is presented in four ways: 1.calm description of horrifying tragedies;2.description of dark realities created via neutral words;3.paradoxical words;4.parody.The second manifestation of black humour in this book is illogical expressions,which more specifically,is illogical cohesion and sophistry.The writer of this report finds out that some methods are frequently used by her when translating black humour expressions into Chinese.She makes case studies on her translation examples and explains the reason for doing so.Literal translation and amplification are frequently used when translating irony.She uses amplification when translating calm description of horrifying tragedies.As for the dark realities created via neutral words,she employs literal translation and adds quotation marks in hertranslation so as to reconstruct the subtle black humour.In order to cater to the TT readers' taste in reading,she adopts literal translation and translates paradoxical words into four-character phrases imparting paradoxical meaning.She keeps the form of the parody in ST so as to keep the black humour as much as possible in her translation.As for the translation of illogical expressions,she adopts literal translation,amplification or rewriting in accordance to the specific situation.She adopts amplification to translate sentences that are illogically connected.As for the sophistry,she adopts rewriting and changes sentence structure in translation so that the black humour could be reconstructed.Finally,the writer of the thesis sums up some useful translation methods for translating black humour expressions in political novels,including amplification,literal translation,and rewriting,etc.This report is expected to be beneficial for other translators in tackling same questions.