| This thesis explores the issue of humor translation in Fortress Besieged from the perspectives of the General Theory of Verbal Humor and the Gestalt Theory of Image Reconstruction, with reference to the famous Chinese novel Wei'cheng (Fortress Besieged) and its English translation.The General Theory of Verbal Humor offers an explanation of the origin of humor. It is a linguistic humor theory which proposes a humor mechanism consisting of six Knowledge Resources with Script Opposition or incongruity as its essential Knowledge Resource. The General Theory of Verbal Humor has achieved prominence as an encompassing and formalized way of understanding humor. Its special significance is that it allows humor to be analyzed systematically and interlingually.The Gestalt Theory of Image Reconstruction offers solutions to evaluating and enhancing the reproduction of humor. Humor is simultaneously an act of speech, social communication, and presentation of a certain aesthetic truth, of which the third involves the creation of new images that reshape people's thinking and stimulate their emotions. In that sense it has its aesthetic value. According to this theory, only when humorous texts are viewed as a whole instead of an isolated phenomenon can the images be fully reproduced in translation.The author will make an attempt to show that the two theories, when integrated, may have great value not only in the translation and comprehension of humor in Fortress Besieged, but they may also shed light on humor translation in general.The humor in Wei 'cheng has its profundity in thought. It is a revelation of human nature, and furthermore, it is rich in cultural connotations.To understand the characteristics of humor in Fortress Besieged, the author felt a strong need to adopt the General Theory of Verbal Humor in order to comprehend the deep connotations in the original version. To reproduce the image of the original humor in this novel, she also felt a need to employ the Gestalt Theory of Image Reconstruction.When encountering a single Script Opposition in a sentence, translators should find a dominant impression in the sentence. When it comes to various Script Oppositions in a sentence, translators should focus on the relationship between them and seek to determine the dominant impression in the sentence. To reproduce a text most accurately, translators should view sentences or paragraphs as a whole rather than focus on isolated words.With a critical analysis of Wei 'cheng and its translation of Fortress Besieged, this study concludes that when translating the humor in Wei 'cheng, the translators mainly employed a literal translation strategy. With regard to the humor that is loaded with cultural elements, especially those unfamiliar to Westerners, it is suggested that a free translation strategy or a strategy combining this with a literal translation be adopted in order to best reproduce the integrated image of the original version. In general, the principles of crucial importance in any strategy of humor translation are, first, to preserve the whole image of the original version and second, to maintain the harmony throughout the translation. |
