On Verbal Humor Translation Of Lao She’s Li Hun

With the fast tempo of globalization, cultural exchange between the East and the West is becoming more and more frequent. Humor, as a common language phenomenon and an effective tool of communication, has been widely applied by writers at home and abroad. Due to the cultural differences, to successfully transfer humor in the ST to the TT is really challenging and painstaking. The English translation of Chinese humorous texts, especially those alive with various rhetorical devices and Chinese alien sources, has been treated as something thorny by many scholars and translators. Though some scholars have paid attention to the translation methods of verbal humor, almost none of them have made a systematic investigation on which translation method is optimum.Regarding Attardo and Raskin’s General Theory of Verbal Humor and its Extended Theory as the theoretical framework, this research attempts to investigate the verbal humor and its English translation in Li Hun by setting up a Chinese-English bilingual parallel database. Then the reservation of parameters and the characteristics of this novel are shown. The author also sums up the distribution of each translation method and the transference of humorous effects. This research aims to answer the following questions: 1. What makes the original novel Li Hun humorous? 2. Can the GTVH be employed to explain the verbal humor contained in long Chinese humorous texts? 3. How does the reservation of the six parameters influence the preservation of humorous effects in the TT? 4. How does the choice of translation methods influence the transference of humorous effects in the TT?The major findings of this research are as follows: 1. The humor in Li Hun is mainly generated by Chinese alien sources and 8 rhetorical devices(simile, metaphor, hyperbole, irony, personification, jiangyong, parody and synesthesia); 2. The General Theory of Verbal Humor can not only be applied to analyze short jokes, but also can be employed to systematically study long Chinese humorous texts; 3.(1) If the target text shares all the six parameters with the source text or only preserves the highest parameter SO excluding 1-2 optional parameters, the humorous effect of the source text is transferred to the target text successfully;(2) If the target text shares 4-5 parameters or 2-3 parameters with the source text excluding the highest parameter SO, the humorous effect is lost. 4. Through a comparative analysis of Li Hun and its English version, five translation methods are adopted. When translating humor embedded in both Chinese alien sources and rhetorical devices, paraphrase(42.9%), omission(28.6%) and synthesization(28.6%) are used. When translating humor embedded in rhetorical devices alone, literal translation(69.9%), paraphrase(15.4%), omission(9.8%), synthesization(2.4%) and substitution(2.4%) are employed.The research results suggest that, in order to effectively transfer the humorous effects in the source text, translators should preserve as many parameters as possible no matter which translation method is adopted, especially the highest parameters. This research not only proves that the GTVH can explain the verbal humor of long Chinese humorous texts, but also shows that the choice of translation methods has exerted significant impacts on the reservation of humorous effects.