A Study On The Production Mechanism Of Verbal Humor In Translation From The Perspective Of Cognitive Context

Humor, as one of the most important products of human society’s culture andlanguage, has been a ubiquitous component of everyday life in any culture or language.During the long history of humor research which can be dated back to as early asancient Greece, abundant great achievements have been made from variousperspectives. And yet for all that, when it comes to what humor is and how it works, noone has ever proposed a theory that satisfies all the scholars in all the fields. Thoughmost theories can be traced back to three famous, classical theories of humor:superiority, relief and incongruity, incongruity seems to have secured the broadestpossible support in discovering the nature of humor, yet still not flawless. And just ashow difficult it is to define humor, categorizing humor seems to pose an equally severechallenge. Presently it is classified according to two forms of expression, those beingsituational and language/verbal. The latter is the research object of this paper.An unprecedented increase in cultural exchanges have been seen betweenAmerica and China, bringing an ever growing number of American books, movies andTV shows translated into Mandarin. Although Chinese are able to witness a differentculture, especially its humorous languages, it doesn’t always mean that they can comprehend what the Americans understand as funny. Usually Chinese have to payextra attention to understand American humorous effects yet, incongruously,sometimes understanding the humour is immediate. This paradox betweenunderstanding and misunderstanding may make them feel confused. Chinese audiencesknow these situations happen daily, but why and what is causing it? Chinese audienceshave to think about American humour to understand it, more specifically, they mustuse their cognitive context to understand and process it. What role cognitive contextplays in producing the humorous effect that Chinese perceive receives little attentionfrom scholars.Cognitive context, put forward under the frame of the Relevance Theory bySperber and Wilson in their book Relevance: Communication and Cognition, statesthat cognitive context is a psychological structure with the components of a sequenceof assumptions which are then continually re-establishing and developing in the courseof communication until it ultimately gains the most probable interpretation of itself soas to serve its communicative purpose. In this sense, the cognitive context plays asignificant role in both the comprehension and generation of verbal humor.So, based on the examples of humor translation collected from real life, and withcognitive context serving as the theoretical framework supporting it, the current thesisis intended to see through the appearance to perceive the essence, that is to study theproduction mechanism of verbal humor in translation from the perspective of cognitivecontext. This paper will also attempt to analyze which part of cognitive context isactivated in the production of humor effect for both American audiences and Chineseaudience.