A Study On Humor Translation In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Humor, condensed from thousands years of humanity and civilization, appears in our daily life and it drives our work and life colourful and delightful. Consequently, the translation of humor weighs increasingly as we experience prosperously growing cross culture communication in modern life. Effected by the obvious differences among cultures, thinking patterns and languages, people find apparent difficulties in translating humor directly and equally which lead humor in certain culture does not interest others who culturally differ from them. However, the emergence of relevance theory makes great contribution to bridge up the gap and brings the translation of humor into a brand new era.Based on relevance theory, translation of humor refers to a communicative process of double ostensive inference. It consists of two ostensive inferences and relates to three communicators. As the intermediary of the cognitive process, translators play dual identities which are in-takers who get information from the original text and exporters who pass the information to a certain group of people at the same time. Thereupon, optimal relevance acts as the key to ensure the success of communication. The translator, during the process of his work of art, must quarry the communicative intention of the original source which comes from the raw material. Simultaneously he has to take the cognitive context of readers with certain language background into his momentous concern. Conducting with proper and various translating strategies, translators deliver the optimal relevance, which weighs the most in communications, to the target language readers successfully.Considering the identical representativeness of the humor expressions in the novel Fortress Besieged written by the most successful writer Qian Zhongshu, this paper picks his best work of art and the translated version as the study case on translation of humor because the novel is full of literal humor in Chinese and the translated version is also welcomed all over the world which means the humor has been successfully translated into the target language. Under the guidance of relevance theory, the author objectively analyses and summarizes the humor translating strategies and skills occurred in the translation of Fortress Besieged. The results and analysis illustrate a fact that translators should solve the instances with relevant strategies according to the different categories of humors including language humors, culture humors, context humors and universal ones. The strategies help to extend the cognitive context of readers and emphasize the best context effect and the cognitive context. As a matter of fact, the translated version satisfies the target readers with a different language to the original work. Meanwhile, this paper states briefly that clear boundaries between diverse translating strategies do not exist, in fact they complete each other while conducting humor translation. Translators should apply various strategies flexibly as a whole to reach the humor in the source text. Only by finishing the art with skillful process can the communicative purpose be achieved. Only by combining the deep understanding and proficient use of all translating strategies appear the optimal relevance, regarded as the ultimate success, in the delicate translation.By going through the precise and exhaustive analysis on humor translation, unprecedentedly and more clearly, the author has experienced the power of relevance theory. From this moment on, the theory shed light on the incessant research and paved way to the next step of study. Translation requires more than just knowing languages but understanding the culture, mastering every single strategy and following strictly to the theory.