幽默和幽默翻译——析《围城》及其英译本

幽默诙谐是小说《围城》的语言风格。本文认为幽默的本质在于"不一致性",它与小说《围城》的思想主旨切合。幽默不仅深化了小说的主题,而且营造了喜剧气氛,是小说不朽艺术魅力的源泉所在。本文以《围城》及其英译本为例,运用系统功能语法和关联理论来分析幽默,探讨幽默翻译过程中的困难和出路,并指出幽默翻译应遵循最佳关联性原则,根据读者的认知环境,恰如其分的重塑各种幽默交际线索,重现原文的各种语篇特征错配或"不一致"。

Fortress Besieged, a novel written by a great Chinese scholar Qian Zhongshu, is renowned for its humor and wit. The nature of humor, according to the author of this article, lies in its incongruity, which identifies with the thematic essence of the novel. Humor creates a comic ambience in which the brutal truth of life is exposed. Drawing on systematic-functional linguistics and relevance theory, this paper holds that a humor translator should pursue optimal relevance in his translation by familiarizing himself with the cognitive environment of both original and target readers and employing proper ways to recast communicative clues of humor and recover the incongruities. The problems in and solutions to humor translation are analyzed and explored through a comparative study of the original humor pieces in the novel and their English translation.