从认知角度看情景喜剧中不可译性造成的幽默缺失——以《老友记》为例

不可译性是指由于源语和目标语存在差异,源语所表达的内容在目标语中找不到相应的对等表达,从而导致翻译困难或无法翻译的现象。不可译现象在翻译中经常存在,目前已有不少研究,但专门针对情景喜剧幽默不可译性的研究不多。本文从认知语言学的范畴化角度,以情景喜剧《老友记》为例,探讨情景喜剧中英语幽默汉译的不可译性及其造成的翻译的幽默缺失,从语言和文化两个方面分别论述了造成英语幽默不可译性的原因,并试图提出一些补偿策略,降低由此造成的幽默缺失。

Untranslatability refers to the translation difficulty or untranslatable phenomenon that the content in the original text could not find any equivalent expressions in the target language, which is caused by the language or culture differences existing between the two languages. The untranslatable phenomena often appear in translation. Even though nowadays there is a lot of study about it, the researches on the untranslatability of humor in situation comedy are very few. This article takes the situation comedy Friends as an example and tries to explore the untranslatable humor and its loss in the translation of Friends from the perspective of categorization in cognitive linguistics. It makes an analysis about the reasons which cause the untranslatability of humor in the situation comedy in light of language and culture, and tries to put forward some compensation strategies to reduce the loss of humor caused by the language or culture differences in the translation.