Translating Verbal Humor In Mark Twain’s Short Stories

Humor,especially verbal humor often appears in daily life and literary works.In the academia,the study of humor is thriving.Many scholars worldwide start from linguistics,literature,aesthetics,psychology,sociology,philosophy and other perspectives to carry out valuable and significant research on humor.Because humor is related to culture,psychology and many other factors,it has caused great difficulty intranslating humor.This study,based on the General Theory of Verbal Humor(GTVH)put forward by Attardo and Raskin and its Extended theory proposed by Ge Lingling and He Yuanjian,selects data from Mark Twain’s six short stories(Running for Governor,Journalism in Tennessee,How I Edited an Agricultural Paper,The Facts in the Case of the Great Beef Contract,Is He Living or Is He Dead? and A Dog’s Tale)and their Chinese versions to build an English-Chinese bilingual parallel database,aiming to study the characteristics of Mark Twain’s humor,the missing humor of the source text in the translation,the compensation of the missing humor in the translation and the relationship between verbal humor in the English source text and the six parameters of the GTVH.Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are made to get the answer to the above questions.Research shows that Mark Twain’s humor often uses “I” as the hero,and “I” am honest and ignorant;his humor contains bitter irony,and often involves the use of exaggeration,personification and irony.In addition,the translated Chinese versions retain the humorous effects of the original English versions successfully on the whole,but there are still a few cases that humor is missing in the target text.The translation compensates the missing humor through rhetorical devices and translation methods.In terms of rhetorical devices,transforming with the same rhetorical device is the main transformation mode.Literal translation,free translation and synthesization are the main translation methods.Four necessary parameters(SO,SI,NS and LA)of the six parameters are related to humor closely,especially the script opposition is the key parameter to trigger humor.This study confirms that the General Theory of Verbal Humor and its Extended Theory may contribute a lot to the humor translation.In order to ensure that the target reader has the same or similar sense of humor as the source reader,the translator is supposed to apply proper translation methods to preserve as many parameters as possible,especially the important or necessary parameters.