Study on the Translation of Verbal Humor in Bridget Jones’s Diary from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

Abstract

Humor is a common phenomenon in daily life. Essentially, it is a special form of verbal communication. Since humor bears special language and cultural characteristics, the difficulty of translation is self-evident for translators. For many years, the translatability and untranslatability of humor have been the focus of the argument among scholars. Relevance theory attempts to explain the mechanism of humor generation and its translation from the perspective of cognition. Under the framework of relevance theory, this paper takes Bridget Jones's Diary and its Chinese version as the research object to explore the translation strategies of verbal humor, and evaluate whether the Chinese translation can represent the same humorous effect as the original. The results show that the translator adopts direct and indirect translation strategies when translating verbal humor, and the translation strategies have effectively achieved the same humorous effect as the original to some extent if the target language readers share the similar cognitive environment with the source language readers in some situations. Nevertheless, the humorous effects may not be fully conveyed in the target texts, especially when translating culturally loaded words and idiomatic expressions. In such cases, the author puts forward some tentative suggestions for improving the translated texts. The study makes an attempt to provide a feasibility analysis for the studies on translation of verbal humor in diary novels.