A Report On C-E Translation Of An Excerpt Of Tales Of Ming Dynasty

Humor,as a communicative way with the function of producing laugh,has the unique artistic effects and communicative values,and the humor of language can create a relaxed,pleasant and harmonious atmosphere.As for English and Chinese languages,people's understanding of humorous information that conveyed by the humor of language and use of language humor are extremely different,not only because they belong to different families but because there are so many differences between these two cultures.In this case,it is necessary to translate Chinese-style language humor and its distinctive performance practice into English,which will help foreign readers better understand and analyze Chinese-style language humor and be helpful to spread the Chinese culture to the world.Relevance translation theory is proposed by Ernst-August Gutt in 1986 based on the relevance theory of Wilson and Sperber.According to Gutt's relevance translation theory,translation is a special form of communication between two languages,which is a double ostensive-inferential process.The key here is to rebuild the optimal relevance,so that the readers can obtain the maximum pragmatic effect to have coincidence between the intention of the original author and the expectations of target readers.The effective transfer of humorous effect is closely related to the best correlation.Two chapters in Tales of Ming Dynasty are chosen as the source text and analyzes the specific translation methods of language humor in detail under the guidance of relevance translation theory.According to the optimal relevance in relevance translation theory,the writer infers the author's writing intention from the source text.Then,the writer tries to understand the communicative environment of the target language readers,so as to maximize the effect of the translation to accord with the readers' expectations by using different translation methods.Under the guidance of the strategy of direct translation and indirect translation proposed by Gutt,the writer finds that most of the humorous effects in the source text can be reproduced and the optimal relevance can be achieved through literal transformation,annotation,adding and interpreting implication.However,the writer alsofinds that some humorous effects are difficult to achieve the optimal relevance through the above translation methods.For example,the expression of Chinese linguistic features,slangs,idioms,and some Chinese sentence patterns are among the great difficulties in translation,so the writer can not accurately reproduce the humorous effects.It is worth making further analysis and research.This thesis consists of five chapters.Chapter 1 is task description,including the background of the task,introduction to the source text,and purpose and significance of the task.Chapter 2 is process description,which contains the pre-translation,the process of the translation,and the post-translation.Chapter 3 is the brief introduction to Gutt's Relevance Translation Theory,and the translation methods that Gutt has proposed: direct translation and indirect translation.Chapter 4 is case analysis.The writer will analyze the translation of language humor in detail according to Relevance Translation Theory.This chapter will discuss numerous examples by translation methods and difficulties the writer met with in reproducing the humorous effects.Chapter 5 is the findings and some limitations of this thesis.