Verbal Humor Translation In The Chinese Version Of Three Men In A Boat From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Verbal humor has always been a common language phenomenon in our everyday lives.In recent years,this linguistic phenomenon has been studied by more and more people,and we gradually began to explore the mechanism of humor formation.According to the relevance theory,verbal humor translation follows the principles of relevance and the optimal relevance hypothesis.At the same time,“verbal humor translation is a kind of dynamic ostensive-inferential communication behavior.” From the perspective of relevance theory,verbal humor is translatable at the macro level.At the micro level,verbal humor is also translatable in semantics,style and culture.Therefore,this thesis mainly applies the concepts of relevance theory to analyze the verbal humor translation in the Chinese version of Three Men in a Boat.It attempts to answer the following two research questions: 1.at the macro lever,it explores how relevance theory explains verbal humor translation,that is,how relevance theory explains the nature of verbal humor translation;2.at the micro lever,the Chinese version of Three Men in a Boat is a case study,it first analyzes and classifies the verbal humor in the text,and then on the basis of classification,it analyzes whether the translation of verbal humor in Chinese version is successful,and whether it can be improved.Jerome.K.Jerome is the most outstanding humorist in modern Britain.Hismost famous humorous novel Three Men in a Boat uses humorous strokes to describe what the three people have seen on the Thames.It has been popular in the West since its publication.Regrettably,the use of relevance theory to study the humor translation of the Three Men in a Boat is still very rare.This thesis mainly uses the concepts of relevance theory to study the Chinese version of Wang Bi's Three Men in a Boat.The thesis discusses how relevance theory explains verbal humor translation,that is,how relevance theory explains the essence of verbal humor translation,and this thesis specifically analyzes the verbal humor translation in the Chinese version of Three Men in a Boat from the perspective of relevance theory.It mainly uses corpus analysis method,classification method,qualitative research method and combines language description and theoretical discussion to study verbal humor.Firstly,the author classifies and summarizes the verbal humor that reflects different rhetorical techniques in the Chinese version,which will be mainly divided into four types,because these four types are most obvious in the translation and the translators use them frequently.They are rhetorical techniques that embody exaggeration,personification,metaphor and irony.Secondly,the author uses the three core concepts of relevance theory,namely,double ostensive-inferential process,cognitive context and optimal relevance theory to analyze the verbal humor translation in the Chinese version of Three Men in a Boat.Finally,the author tries to use the perspective of relevance theory to analyze the success of Chinese translation and provide improvements so as to finally prove that relevance theory applies to the field of literary translation,which has theoretical significance and the practical significance to guide humor translation.