| Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is a famous Americanhumorist. One of Mark Twain’s representative works is The Adventures of Tom Sawyerwhich is characterized by humorous and colloquial language and very popular amongreaders at home and abroad. With a cheerful tone, Mark Twain satirized American vulgarcustoms and hypocritical religious rituals, and gave high praise of the honest, uprightnature of children. Since humor is closely linked with culture, cognition and context, itstranslation is rather difficult. Humor translation of this novel has been hardly studied in theprevious studies and no general principles have been proposed, the exploration in this area,therefore, is of certain practical and theoretical significance.Pragmatic translation explores translation from the perspective of pragmatics, aimingto deal with the comprehension and expression of pragmatic meanings as well as thecultural factors, which offers translation a kind of theoretical foundation with deepsignificance. The combination of pragmatic theories and humor translation is a newattempt and exploration in the area of pragmatic translation.The thesis, with humor translation as the research object, intends to reveal therelationship between pragmatics and humor production by means of qualitative analysis,and explore the general principles and corresponding strategies in humor translationthrough making a comparative study of two Chinese versions of The Adventures of TomSawyer.The application of pragmatic theories provides a new perspective for humortranslation and is proved to be of strong interpretive power. The author proposes fourmaxims which require the translator to faithfully deliver the content of the humor, fullyconsider the readability of the translation, flexibly deal with cultural elements andultimately represent the humorous effect. Through the comparative study, it can beconcluded that the four maxims not only serve as the guidance of humor translation, butalso an evaluation criterion to judge whether the translation is successful or not. The thesisis expected to shed some light on humor translation in future studies. |
