English Pun Translation--From A Sociosemiotic Perspective

The thesis is intended for the study of pun translation from English toChinese under the guidance of sociosemiotic approach. And the thesis also reveals the development of sociosemiotics and its application in translation practice. Men are always exploring new ways of expression to content their seeking for novelty. The employment of pun, which can go back to 2,000 years ago, meets their demand in this aspect. The use of pun and the language exchange direetly leads to pun rendition that has long been regarded as a challenging task due to the phonological or lexical vacancy between a source and target language. The barrier in pun translation exists as long as linguistic and cultural differences exist.Sociosemiotics, the study of science of sign systems in the context of society, is primarily concerned with human semiosis as an inherently social phenomenon in its sources, functions, contexts and effects. It is also concerned with the social meanings constructed through the full range of semiotic forms, through semiotic texts and semiotic practices, in all kinds of human society at all periods of human society. As Nida puts in Language and Culture, "The most pervasive and crucial contribution to an understanding of translation is to be found in sociosemiotics, the discipline that treats all the systems of signs used by human societies. The great advantage of semiotics over other approaches to interlingual communication is that it deals with all types of codes and signs, no holistic approach to translating can exclude semiotics as a fundamental discipline in encoding and decoding signs."Sociosemiotic approach sees translating as the message transition between two semiotic systems, which takes both the language user and the outside world into sign process, and it extends the study from the mere linguistic field to the human society. What's more, the approach reveals the dialectical relationship between the translatability and its limit: translators are bound to be confined to the various sociocultural settings, they cannot reach the absolute faithfulness, with the development of cultural exchanges and the assimilation of diverse cultures, the obstruction of the sign transmission decreases gradually, but will never vanish.The criteria adopted in pun translation are text-type specific criteria enlightened by sociosemiotics, Newmark's six functions of language and text type. Text is sign system. Translating is a process of decoding and encoding in sign system. Therefore, translation criteria are determined by functions of language and text type. The criteria may not be too abstract or too general. In the entire process of translation, both the correct comprehension of the source text and the appropriate expression in the target language depend on the specific text type, negligence of which may lead to misunderstanding and mistranslating The text-type specific criteria are closely associated with text type, which makes the evaluation of translation workable.Through the comprehensive collection of the examples available and careful analysis, the author intends to prove the practicability of sociosemiotic approach in English pun rendition, as well as its text-type specific criteria in translation evaluation.