On Translation Of Humor In Cultural Context

Malinowski, an English anthropologist, put forward the concept of context in the 19th century. He argues that context includes situational context and cultural context. Firth, the founder of London School, accepts the concept of context. He realizes the context plays an important role in the research of language. Halliday who is the founder of systemic functional linguistics does great contribution to the theory of context. He explains the relationship between situational context and cultural context. There are many scholars who make research on the concept of context in China. Zhang Zhigong regards situational context and cultural context together as language context. Wang Dechun has discussed the content of context. Many other scholars have made profound research on the context of culture. Their theories discuss the cultural context and reveal the influence of culture on translation.Cultural context is a general concept, including all the activities in human social life. Different nations have different social tradition, historical knowledge, national sentiment, custom and so on. Humor, as a culture phenomenon, exists in our daily life. There are many forms of humor; humor is expressed by humorous language most often. Humorous language reflects the forms of human communication and harmonizes interpersonal relationship. Due to cultural differences, people from different cultural communities have different interpretations of humor. A kind of humor in a particular cultural background may not be able to be accepted by people in other social communities. Translation is a kind of communication activity cross culture. The quality of translated version depends on whether the target language readers have the same interpretation of the humor implied in the original text or not. Cultural differences cause the unavoidable difficulties in humor translation.The insertion of cultural context into translation studies gives rise to humor translation, which provides nourishment for traditional theories and practices. Against the background of globalization, it is of great necessity and importance to systematically introduce cultural context theory into translation. This paper was made, on one hand, for the sake of systemizing this theory, and on the other hand, in the interest of inspiring humor translation in certain ways and liberating in a way humor translation studies. This thesis studies on the translation of humor from the perspective of cultural context and emphasizes the influences of cultural context in translation. Considering the cultural differences is the unavoidable question in humor translation, the author attempts to suggest some methods can be adopted in the translation, including literal translation, free translation, paraphrase, substitution and annotation with some examples used to demonstrate the application of these methods.