A Descriptive Study On Humor Translation In Howard Goldblatt's Translation Of Wa

The study of translation is a long-standing research area with various theories and viewpoints proposed by different schools of thought.However,traditional translation studies are mainly carried out in a prescriptive way.Based on linguistic theories,traditional translation studies emphasize the equivalence between source text and target text in form and meaning so as to formulate a set of universal rules and guidelines for translation evaluation.The descriptive translation theory,which emerged in the 1970 s,deconstructed the traditional translation theories so that translation research was no longer confined to language itself,but rather viewed in historical and cultural context.Descriptive translation studies attempts to find the cultural and historical “facts” out of translation phenomena by describing actual translation behavior and its results in order to find the factors that affect the translator's decision-making in terms of language,culture and literature,so as to explain the translator's recurring preference in the process of translation.The present thesis attempts to study humor translation in Howard Goldblatt's English translation of Wa from descriptive perspectives,with descriptive translation research approach as its framework and parallel corpus as its research tool.It describes translation phenomena in Howard Goldblatt's translation of Wa and analyzes the decision-making process of humor translation in terms of lexis(cultural images,idioms and slangs)and syntax(rhythm and rhyme,figure of speech and tension)to reveal the factors that affect humor translation and study on translation strategies in literary works.Based on the above analysis,the paper further discusses on the translation philosophy implied in Howard Goldblatt's linguistic orientation and the readers' response in the English-speaking world.There come the following conclusions: before translation,Howard Goldblatt selects works for translation according to his personal preference and market potential.When translating humorous texts in Wa,the translator deftly applies the strategies of literal and liberal translation,domestication and foreignization to link the source culture and the target culture so as to achieve balance between them.Onlexical level,the translator takes a full account of readers' acceptability.The translator's faithfulness to the source text is supplemented by similar substitutions and moderate rewritings.On syntactic level,the translator simulates the rhythm and rhyme of the source text,domesticates the figures of speech and reconstructs and recreates long sentences.Howard Goldblatt's application of strategies and methods in dealing with humor translation in Wa provides a good reference for Chinese-English humor translation.