On The English Translation Of Chinese Humorous Texts

Humor, a very effective tool of communication, has been widely employed by authorsin Chinese and English literature. Due to the enormous cultural differences, there existmany obstacles in the process of humor translation. The English translation of Chinesehumorous texts, especially Chinese classical literature, which is full of rhetorical devicesand Chinese alien sources, has always been considered as hard nuts to crack by scholarsand translators. The methods used in humor translation may have been discussed in manyresearches before. However, there is no strong theoretical guideline provided in thoseresearches as to in what way the translation of humor should comply with to selecttranslation methods.Taking Attardo and Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humor and its ExtendedTheory as the theoretical foundation, this research aims to probe into the characteristics aswell as translation methods of verbal humor in Ru Lin Wai Shi (The Scholars), with a focuson a systematic analysis of Ru Lin Wai Shi and its English version with its Chinese-Englishbilingual parallel database as the research approach, hoping that the research findings mayhelp readers better enjoy the humor contained in Chinese humorous texts, and at the sametime, set the foundation for the further studies of humor translation in Chinese humoroustexts.The following are the brief summaries of the major findings of this research:(1) TheGeneral Theory of Verbal Humor can not only provide an analytic framework for shortjokes, but also allow verbal humor in long Chinese humorous texts to be studied interlingually and systematically;(2) The generation of verbal humor contained in Chinesehumorous texts relies heavily on rhetorical devices and Chinese alien sources;(3) Throughthe contrastive analysis on the source text and the target text, there are mainly sixtranslation methods for verbal humor in all. Literal translation that occupies48.1%takesup the largest proportion among the six. Paraphrase is the second frequently-appliedtranslation method that takes31%. As for substitution, synthesization, annotation andomission, the proportion is much less than that of literal translation and paraphrase.The research results show that in translating verbal humor, the translator should notonly preserve as many KRs as possible, but also take the characteristics of Chinesehumorous texts and the target reader’s acceptance into full consideration.