On The Translation Approaches To Humorous Items In Fortress Besieged From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

As the achievement of human beings‘language and a reflection of humanbeings‘wisdom, humor is widely used in various kinds of literary works. Endowingthe charm to a piece of work, humor makes readers taste the unrevealed meaning in arelaxing and interesting manner. The importance of humor in literary works graduallydraws the attention in the field of literary translation. However, humor translationsuffers from the gaps lying in languages and cultures, which demands that translatorstake into account many factors and adopt the most appropriate translation approachesto retain the humorous effect to the largest extent. Fortress Besieged by QianZhongshu is regarded as the example among the humorous works. It is really a bigchallenge for translators to make the target readers get the humor to the largest extentthrough translation. Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K. Mao make a meaningful attempt totranslate this work. Therefore, the thesis tries to study the translation approaches tothe humorous items based on their translation.In recent years, humor translation has been vastly studied from the aspect ofFunctional Equivalence theory, Relevance theory, Skopos theory, etc. However, thereis relatively less study of this issue under Reception Aesthetics. The thesis attempts tostudy the humor translation under the guidance of this theory. Humor translationrequires that the target text produce the similar humorous effect for target readers asthe source text. Reception Aesthetics represented by Jauss and Iser is a kind ofreader-centered literary theory, which makes this theory feasible to guide humortranslation. Particularly, reader-centered, horizon of expectation, blanks andindeterminacies of the theory play significant roles in leading the translators to retainthe humorous effect and choose proper translation approaches.This thesis firstly has a review of Reception Aesthetics and humor. And then itpresents a classification of the humorous items in Fortress Besieged, that is,linguistically humorous items, culturally humorous items and universally humorousitems. As for the linguistically humorous items, the author studies it from the lexicaland rhetorical aspects. In regard to culturally humorous items, the author divides it into humorous items of social, religious and material culture. Then the author makes acareful study of the translation approaches to those humorous items in the target text.Finally, the author analyzes the gains and losses of those translation approaches intransmitting the humorous effect from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics.Through the study and analysis, the author finds that Jeanne&Mao have adoptedseveral kinds of translation approaches. Among those translation approaches, literaltranslation is used the most, which affects the transmitting of the humorous effectmore or less. Thus, the author suggests using the approach of literal translation withannotation to retain the humorous effect as much as possible. Through the study of thetranslation approaches to humorous items under Reception Aesthetics, the author alsofinds that this theory can guide the humor translation to some extent.