A Reievance-Theoretic Study Of Humourous Utterance Translation

This thesis explores the issue of humorous utterance and humorous utterance translation in the light of relevance theory. The data are collected from the famous Chinese novel Fortress Besieged and its English version.As a pragmatic theory interpreting communication, relevance theory is formally proclaimed by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson. It proposes that language communication is an ostensive-inferential process, and claims that human communication is characterized by the search for optimal relevance, that is, to achieve adequate contextual effect without pulling gratuitous processing effort.From the perspective of relevance theory, the translation is an ostensive-inferential communication in nature. It is a process in which the translator seeks the optimal relevance between cognitive environment of source language and target language. That is to say, the translator expects the target reader is presumed to have adequate contextual effects without gratuitous processing effort. Relevance theory also proposes that translation is an interlingual interpretive use, and a translation would be a receptor language text that interpretively resembled the original. Therefore, the optimal relevance is always the principle that should be adhered to in the translation process. The translator should make effort to make the intentions by the source text author identical with the expectations of target text readers.Humor has been a heated and multi-disciplinary topic. This thesis attempts to study the humorous utterance and its translation in the field of cognitive pragmatics. According to the relevance-based account of translation, the humorous utterance translation, as a communication across language and culture, involves a dual process of communication between the source text and author, the translator and the target text reader, during which the translator infers the communicative intentions of the source text author, then by assessing the cognitive environments of the source text author and target text readers, makes the optimal relevant translation by preserving various kinds of humorous clues so that the translation can achieve the humorous effect as the original.The specific cases of humorous utterance are collected from the famous Chinese novel Fortress Besieged and its English version. Qian Zhongshu, the author, employs a great many linguistic manipulations to create humorous utterance in order to achieve the effect of satire and irony. In the thesis, the humorous utterance and its translation in Fortress Besieged are discussed from the perspective of relevance theory. By combining humorous utterance translation with the developing study of relevance theory, the thesis intends to prove that relevance theory is powerful in accounting the theory and practice of translation, especially in explaining humorous utterance translation.Both theoretical discussions and a case study indicate that, in the process of translating humorous utterance, the translator should be consistency with the principle of relevance, and make effort to ensure that the humorous intentions by the source text author and expectations of target text readers will be in line, thereby to ensure the translation validity and the humorous effect.