Reproducing Humor Of The Toys Of Peace From The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence

This commentary,from the perspective of Eugene A.Nida’s theory of functional equivalence,focuses on the classification and techniques of humor translation in the practice of translating five short stories of The Toys of Peace.Functional equivalence emphasizes the equivalence of function instead of the linguistic form.Readers’ response,namely readers of the target text having the same response as those of readers of the original text,is an important factor to judge translation effect.Humor in literary works adds to it distinctive character and readability.But the form of humor varies among different languages and cultures,bringing challenge to translators.Humor in the original text satirizes the upper class and the political reality and these effects should be well retained in the target text.J.R.Schmitz classified humor into three types:universal or reality-based humor,cultural-based humor and linguistic or word-based humor.Based on this classification and the original texts,humor in the texts is discussed from linguistic and non-linguistic perspectives.Direct translation,amplification,replacement and annotation are proposed to reproduce humor of the original texts.