A Comparative Study On The Translation Of Black Humor From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Black humor is a new breakthrough in American literature in the 1960s.Because of its peculiar style,it has always been a difficult point for translation.Catch-22,as a pioneering work in black humor,has eleven Chinese versions at present,which provides the best materials for researches on the translation of black humor.With the help of relevance theory,this paper adopts case analysis as methodology to make a comparative study of how Nan,Yang and Wu transmit black humor in their versions.The paper mainly discusses three aspects:firstly,comparing similarities and differences of the three versions in the ostension of black humor as far as double ostensive-inferential translation progress is concerned;secondly,exploring the translation of culture-specific items characterized by black humor in the three versions,including proper nouns,common nouns,and foreign language;finally,probing into the achievement of the optimal relevance in transmitting communicative clues to black humor,including phonetic clues,lexical clues,syntactic clues,rhetorical clues,cohesive clues,and contextual effect of black humor.Major findings of the thesis include:all the three Chinese versions take into account cognitive context of the target readers,and thus mostly employ the means of adding annotation to compensate for the absence of cognitive context;influenced by translators’subjectivity,translation strategies used in the three Chinese versions are different,each has its own merits;in the light to relevance theory,translators are encouraged to use a flexible measure as long as they can preserve and transmit black humor in the source language.