《围城》英译本中幽默语言的翻译分析(英文)

Abstract: Humor is pervasive in out life. It gives us a feeling of releasing and humor, not only helpful to oil interpersonal relationships, ease the contradiction, but also elevate peoples’ inner spiritual world. More and more people explores, studies, applies, and enjoys humor. During the increasingly frequent cross-cultural communication worldwide, translation of humor is surely supposed to be the essential part of the cross-cultural communication. Fortress Besieged is the masterpiece of Qian Zhongshu, as a modern Chinese classical work, it is a satirical comical novel and its comical style to a large degree is achieved through the use of the humor. As the first English version of the novel has its gains and losses, which can be easily found in its translation of humor. In this paper, based on Skopostheorie of functionalist translation theory and the translation strategies adopted in the English version, the author has, through a study of the humorous language in Fortress Besieged, analyzed the English version of the novel’s gains and losses. This research is of certain significance to the translation of the humorous language and how to use humorous language correctly in communication.

Key Words: Humor; Humorous language; Fortress Besieged; Skopostheorie; Translation strategies

摘  要：幽默在我们的日常生活中几乎无处不在。它给人以轻松诙谐之感，不仅利于活跃气氛、缓和矛盾，而且提高了人们的精神境界。越来越多的人探讨、研究、使用幽默。在跨文化交流日益频繁的今天，幽默翻译应当之无愧成为文化交流中不可或缺的一部分。《围城》是钱钟书先生的一部力作，是中国近代小说的一部经典之作，是一部富有喜剧性的讽刺小说，而它的幽默诙谐的喜剧风格在很大程度上得力于幽默语言的运用。作为这部小说的第一个面世的英译本，有得也有失,其得失在幽默语言翻译方面体现的尤为明显。本文以功能翻译理论的核心理论目的论为依据，并结合小说英译本中采取的一些策略，分析了小说英译本的一些得失。本研究对幽默语言的翻译和在交际中如何正确使用幽默语有一定意义。

关键词：幽默；幽默语言；围城；目的论；翻译策略

Introduction
Humor is a phenomenon popular in human communication in all societies. In particular with a national style, it might well be considered as a needed issue of across-cultural communication, for humor mirrors dimensions of culture. It brings laughter to people and enriches both their language and culture. Much humor finds expression in language. Humorous language is a particular kind of language which creates or expresses humor. Both Chinese and English abound in humorous language. Though translation activities both in China and in the West have existed in the world for thousands of years, through a survey of the previous studies on humor and translation, the author of the thesis has found that “non-translatability of humor” is the dominating idea in this area. Yet with the advancement of translation theories as well as the non-stop effort made by numerous scholars and translators, functionalist translation theory has been introduced into the translation of humor. Base on the Skopostheorie of functionalist translation theory, the author of this paper analyzed the translation of humorous language in the English version of Fortress Besieged.
Fortress Besieged, a masterpiece of Qian Zhongshu, has been regarded as the funniest and elaborated-written novel in the history of modern Chinese literature probably is the greatest one [1]. From the result of the searching online, there are a good number of papers to the art of language in the novel, but few of them study those humorous expressions in the novel from the point view of translation, which leaves somewhat a vacancy in cross-cultural exchanges. This is also unbalanced compared with the novel’s great fame in China especially in terms of its humorous language style.
However, the English version of Fortress Besieged (co-translated by Jeanne Kelly and Nathan K.Mao) is chosen to be discussed in the thesis for it seems not as satisfactory as the original and some of the problems are to be listed in the third chapter. The purpose of this thesis is to make a descriptive study on the translations of humorous expressions, only a corner of the “humor family” as a big entity.
The thesis is divided to three chapters: Chapter One studies on humor, focusing on definitions of humor, classifications of humor and functions of humor. Chapter Two introduces the humorous language in Fortress Besieged, including a brief introduction to the novel Fortress Besieged, the characteristics of humorous language in Fortress Besieged and some comments on the English version. Chapter Three analyzes the translation of humorous language in Fortress Besieged, including the introduction to Skopostheorie of functionalist translation theory, translation strategies in the English version.

1  Studies on humor
This chapter is dedicated to some explanations about humor, including its definitions, classifications and functions.
1. 1 Definitions of humor
When discussing humor, defining this concept is one of the thorniest issues. Usually when we are confronted with humor, we can feel it; however, when required to give a definition, we can do little about it. Despite the difficulties involved in defining humor, scholars or dictionaries still manage to provide definitions of humor from different perspectives.转贴于 酷文网-论文下载中心 http://www.coolwen.net