The Relevance In The Translation Of Black Humor Fiction

Black humor is a literary genre featured by absurdness,abnormality,and morbidity,a form of comedy combining pain and laughter,ridiculous facts and disproportionately calm reaction,cruelty and tenderness.It made its appearance in1960 s in the United States.Black humor belongs to comedy,but carried the property of tragedy.It makes comedy come out of the tragic reality,satirizing with absurd form and ridiculing the real world.As more and more black humor novels are introduced into China recently,the translation of these novels affect the target audience to appreciate the black humor effect and its spread in China.Because of the uniqueness of the language in black humor novels,the translation becomes a difficult problem for the translator.Due to the literary characteristics of black humor novels,the success of the delivery of its textual effect plays a crucial role in translation.The translator,serving as a bridge linking source language and target language,should adopt suitable translation method and choose proper words to reduce as much the target reader’s processing effort as he could while remaining as much the textual effect,so as to achieve optimal relevance.By evaluating the Chinese translation of a short story collection written by the black humor master Vonnegut,Look at the Birdie,this paper analyzes how relevant approach to translation guides the translation process of black humor from English to Chinese.Based on the text type occurred in this black humor novel,the dissertation conducts analysis on the translation of satirical language,idioms,and invented words,trying to provide corresponding translation methods from the perspective of relevance theory,such as annotation,paraphrase,and so on.In general,the translated version of Tang Jianqing conveys most of the textual effect in black humor diction except for a few cases of translation.Besides,the paper also offers a version that can improve the translation of this book.