从关联理论角度看《生活大爆炸》中的幽默汉译

论文总字数：29526字

摘 要

幽默是一种普遍存在的人类现象，在社会生活的方方面面都起着至关重要的调节作用，它能缓解紧张尴尬的气氛，它能带来欢乐和愉悦。随着不同国家间的交流变得越来越频繁，大量的英语幽默作品被引入中国，而美剧则受到越来越多中国年轻人，尤其是英语学习者的青睐，观看配有翻译字幕的美剧是一种有效的学习英语和进行文化交流的手段。但是，英语幽默一直被翻译界界定为不可译的，因为翻译英语幽默需要充分了解目的语与原语的文化和语言的分歧,所以本研究尝试从关联理论角度，以《生活大爆炸》为研究对象，对幽默翻译做一个个案研究。

本文首先回顾了关联理论和言语幽默的相关理论，重点从关联理论的角度探讨《生活大爆炸》中的幽默案例翻译（本文中研究的言语幽默翻译案例的中文字幕均转自搜狐网的字幕翻译组），归纳该剧中的幽默翻译方法，以期为关联理论的应用与幽默翻译的研究作出一点贡献。

关键词：关联理论；《生活大爆炸》；幽默翻译

Contents

1. Introduction 1

2. Literature Review 2

2.1 An Introduction of Relevance Theory 2

2.2 A Brief Review on Humor Translation 3

3. Humor Translation in The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of Relevance Theory 6

3.1 Addition 6

3.2 Reduction 8

3.3 Replacement 9

3.4 Recreation 11

4. Conclusion 12

Works Cited 13

1. Introduction

Serving as a significance part in enriching our lives and making it more joyful, humor is increasingly becoming a part of intercultural communication. As the communication between China and other countries becomes more and more frequent, China has inevitably imported a lot of famous works on humor and a lot of American TV series also gain the popularity in China as they offer a way to learn English quickly and easily. However, humor translation is not an easy job as a result of language and cultural barriers.

The Big Bang Theory，first released in 2007, is an American situation comedy set in Pasadena, California. The core character in this play is Sheldon Cooper, a theoretical physicist, who has an IQ of 187, but his EQ is incredibly low. He works hard at his academic researches but rarely pays attention to other people’s feelings. With a strange sense of humor, he sometimes makes his friends mad as he is too self-absorbed for the most of the time.

Leonard Hofstadter, who shares the apartment with Sheldon Cooper, is an experimental physicist born into a family full of accomplished scientists. Compared with Sheldon Cooper, he is much more friendly and knows how to communicate with other people. He likes his neighbor Penny, an outgoing and attractive girl who wants to be an actress but ends up working as a waitress. She is not very smart.

Howard Wolowitz and Rajesh Koothrappali are their friends. Rajesh is a particle astrophysicist. He is very shy and cannot talk to girls without drinking alcohol. Howard speaks several languages and likes showing off his language talents in front of girls. He thinks he is good at flirting but in fact most girls are repelled by his annoying behavior.

A beautiful girl and four “science geeks” make up the story and they create different kinds of verbal humor according to their different characters.

In this thesis, some examples from this famous American TV series the Big Bang Theory will be categorized to illustrate the explanatory power of Relevance Theory, which is proposed by Sperber and Wilson and focuses more on context and the cognitive environment and may be applied successfully to humor translation.

2. Literature Review

2.1 An Introduction of Relevance Theory

Relevance theory is presented by Sperber and Wilson. It turns out to be a quite infusive theory on coetaneous pragmatic research. Some basic principles of Relevance Theory in this part will be declared to give the essential information to understand the theory.

According to Sperber and Wilson, the capacity to make inferences from behavior of other people, is the significant mental ability which makes people able to exchange ideas with each other (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 54). Thus in Relevance Theory, translation is a kind of communication and it can be regarded as an ostensive-inferential process. The communicator needs to produce an oral stimulus. Then the audience can infer what the communicator “means” from what he says, that’s to say, what his communicative intention and informative intention are in terms of Relevance Theory.

If someone asked me, “Can you tell me the way to Nanjing Railway Station?” My answer may be, “Sorry, I am a stranger here myself.” In this case, the questioner would get the information from my answer that I cannot offer the necessary information which he is asking by saying “I am a stranger here myself.”(Gutt, 2004: 25).

Relevance Theory defines context as “a psychological construct, a subset of the hearer’s assumption about the world”, more specifically, “It is the set of prerequisite used in explaining that discourses.” (Sperber and Wilson, 1986: 15) What is the context in this view? It involves all kinds of information stored in the listener’s mind, such as religious beliefs, future expectations, and common sense, instead of being limited to the physical environment of your communication or the utterances that you are saying. As a result it can contribute to utterance interpretation.

Hence, according to Relevance Theory, context that we have discussed here is not equal to some part of the communication partners’ external physical environment; instead it deals with the listener’s internal knowledge system. Context in Relevance Theory is dynamic rather than static. Therefore, context in the communication is chosen by the listener rather than given to him. The search of relevance influences the selection of a certain context. So in verbal comprehension, the selection of context is very important since whether the hearer can find a correct context or not will influence the comprehension of the utterances. In order to select a correct context that can produce speaker-intended assumptions, hearers must use cognitive environment, which has two important terms in relevance, contextual effects and processing efforts.

Contextual effect means that if an assumption needs to be relevant in a context, then it must have some connections with the context. The contextual effects cannot be achieved easily so it needs some effort to process it, which is called processing effort. Both the two factors are context-dependent.

As for the principles of relevance, according to Sperber and Wilson’s book, relevance can be divided into the optimal relevance and the maximal relevance. The optimal relevance can be defined as achieving the suitable contextual effects with the most efficient effort in the translation of utterances and the maximal relevance refers to the minimal possible effort to get greatest contextual effects when a person interprets a discourse.

Sometimes, the speaker intentionally creates a gap between the optimal relevance and the maximal relevance, for example, the production of humor. That is why we can apply Relevance Theory to humor understanding and humor translation, in which process the translator seeks to achieve the optimal relevance in the target language.

According to framework of the Relevance Theory, translation is an ostensive-inferential process. When we translate a text, we should first understand the original text. If we want to understand the original text, we have to emphasize on the context. By the analysis of the context, we can find out the optimal relevance between the original text and context and then understand the original text under the contextual effect. In terms of humorous language translation, the translator is both the first receptor and the second speaker, and the target language receptor is able to draw inferences from what the translator produces and finally finds out the communicator’s intention. However, the intention of the source language communicator depends on the perfect application of the correct contextual expectations, for the incorrect contextual information may probably result in a total failure of this inferential communication.

2.2 A Brief Review on Humor Translation

The ability to appreciate and enjoy humor is shared by people of different cultural backgrounds and customs. Humor is the combination of inspiration and wisdom, which can bring happiness and joy to people. Then, what is humor?

Etymologically, “humor”is derived from a Latin word “humere”, which has the meaning of, “moisture”, “fluid” and “liquid” (Chen Shuhua, 1990: 357). In ancient Greece, it referred to “body fluids” primarily. Greek people argued that it is a physiological term representing fluids stored inside the body: blood (representing the optimistic positive upward attitude), phlegm (denoting cold nature), melancholy (denoting depressed attitude) and choler (meaning bad temper). And these four kinds of fluids determined the mental and physical qualities of a person. As a result, the mixture of these four fluids was thought to influence a person’s personalities and characteristics.

With time passing by, the word “humor” has lost its original meaning but gained the meaning associated with laughter. However, even until now, there is no absolute definition of humor taken by all experts and scholars in this area. Here are some versions proposed by different people:

Humor is the property of writing, speech, or action, which arouses excitement; singularity, buffoonery (Simpson and Weiner, 1989: 486).

Humor is the characteristic in an accident, an action, an occasion, or a manifestation of ideas which attracts a sense of the funniness or absurdly uncoordinated (Gove, 1976: 1102).

Humor is the thing which evokes joy, laughter, etc., or refers to the ability for realizing, responding to, or describing something that is interesting, entertaining, etc. (Watson, 1976: 523).

Humor is the quality in something that makes it funny or amusing or it is the quality to laugh at things that are amusing (Hornby, 2009: 1000).

Although humor is difficult to define, humor can be treated as a kind of communication under certain context in which a complex mental and physical stimulus involves and surprise and laughter arise.

As for the classification of humor, there is no consistent view in the academic world. McGhee figures out that there has been extensive argument on how many types of humor are there in the world through the centuries (McGhee, 1979: 19). Researchers in different fields try to classify humor from different perspectives. For instance, according to different audience, humor may be categorized into children’ humor and adults’ humor. And it can be classified into modern humor and ancient humor in terms of its history. From the perspective of contents, it can be categorized into religious humor, political humor, ethic humor, family humor, etc.

Broadly speaking, humor may be divided into non-verbal humor and verbal humor. However, this paper will focus on verbal humor. According to Bergson (Bergson, 1928: 136), verbal humor is divided into situational humor and language humor. Situational humor is the humor which can produce its distinctive humorous charm only when it is put in a certain context, whereas the language itself does not contain the ingredients of humor.

Language humor can also be called the rhetoric of humor which causes humorous effect by the variation usage of some language elements such as pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar with rhetoric and language skills. It includes the transformation of synonymy, antonym, polysemy and hyponymy and some rhetoric devices like pun, figurative expression, exaggeration, irony and contradiction.

As the exchange of Chinese and foreign cultures becomes increasingly frequent, more and more English humors and jokes are introduced into China. The translation of these humors and jokes becomes popular. Many experts and scholars try to illustrate the mechanism of English humor and put forward many theories to explain the translation of humor.

Some scholars try to explore the translation of humor with Chinese traditional theory by Yan fu, or they tend to explain it with Nida’s “functional equivalence theory”. However it has proved that the translation of humor will not be an easy thing and the traditional translation theories cannot explain it very well. Isaac Bashevis Singer, a well known Polish-American writer, has emphasized that humor and poetry are virtually untranslatable from one language to another (Guo Jie, 2006: 72). However, Dr. Nilson in University of Arizona believes that humor is completely translatable: “The similarity in language does not lie in the form but lies in cognitive psychology.”（Zhao Yanfang, 2001: 13）“Although readers or listeners will have different understanding in different cognitive contexts, the regular pattern of information processing is the same, so the common conclusion will be reached.”（Zhao Yanchun, 2003: 20）

“If the response of the readers to the translation is consistent with the response of the readers to the original text, then the translation can be regarded as a success.” (Ouyang Llifeng, 2002: 51) He figures out that the target of humor translation is to achieve the humorous effect of the humor materials and he believes that the first thing that the translator should take into consideration is to achieve the faithfulness of the intention of source language which serves as a guidance in the application of humor translations.

The argument about translatability and untranslatability is always a problem that bothers different translation theory schools. But this problem can be better explained from the perspective of the Relevance Theory so the thesis tries to analyze how humor translation is realized in the Big Bang Theory from this perspective.

3. Humor Translation in The Big Bang Theory from the Perspective of Relevance Theory

In this part, the thesis will try to adopt Relevance Theory to analyze in what ways humor in the Big Bang Theory is translated into Chinese.

3.1 Addition

In some cases, the original information is not relevant enough to provide adequate contextual effects for the audience to thoroughly understand the original message. In this kind of situation, necessary information should be added in the translation to ensure that the audience can fully understand the dialogue without spending unnecessary processing efforts.

Example 1

Leonard: What are you doing?

Sheldon: I’m straightening up.

Leonard: Sheldon, this is not your home.

Sheldon: This is not everyone’s home. This is a swirling vortex of entropy.

雷纳德：你在干嘛？

谢尔顿：我在整理。

雷纳德：谢尔顿，这不是你的家。

谢尔顿：这谁的家都不是。这是一团熵(熵越大，系统越无序)。

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