An Application Of Relevance Translation Theory To Humor Translation In Movies

Based on Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory, Gutt put forward relevance translation theory that provides a new perspective for translation. This thesis aims at applying relevance translation theory to humor translation in movies.As a universal language, humor plays a major role in our daily life. Although humor has been studied by a lot of scholars from many different kinds of perspectives, such as sociology, psychology, philosophy and etc., the translatability and untranslatability of humor are still a controversial issue. Some scholars hold that humor translation are to some extent no less than those involved in poetry translation, and sometimes it just can not be translated. Some argue its untranslatability mainly as a result of differences in language and cultural background between countries. Of course, there are still other voices. More and more people realize that humor is translatable, and put forward the relevant translation approaches based on functional translation. However, few people have studied humor translation from the perspective of relevance translation theory, not to mention the research on linguistic and cultural humor in movies.Within the framework of Gutt’s relevance translation theory, this paper has pointed out the importance of relevance translation theory to humor translation, and explained the translatability of humor translation from the perspective of relevance translation theory, especially humorous utterance with cultural and linguistic elements. According to this theory, the translator should not only analyze the cognitive environment of the original writer and make a correct inference of humor from the original text, but also take the target audience’s cognitive environment into consideration in the process of translation. So long as the translator can reconstruct the optimal relevance regarding culture and language in the target utterance by maintaining the communicative clues of original text or making some changes to the expressive form that the target audience can have the same response as the source audience, that is to say, the humorous effect in the source utterance has been retained, the humor translation is considered to be successful. This is the principle (also criterion) the humor translation should conform to.Finally, the author applies this conclusion to humorous dialogs with culture and language in movies, and further discusses such several specific translation strategies as literal translation, annotation and paraphrase to handle different situations in movies on the basis of direct and indirect translation proposed by Gutt. It should be noted that whatever method is chosen in practice, it is workable so long as it can reach optimal relevance.