The Translation of English and Chine Puns from the Perspective of Relevance Theory
He Jing, School of English and International Studies, Beijing Foreign Studies University
ABSTRACT
高分
This paper attempts to provide a relevance-theoretic account for the translation of puns between English and Chine. The rich cultural connotations behind puns and the distinctive features of the puns‘ form, sound and meanings po great challenges to the translator. Relevance Theory, as a communication theory on the basis of cognitive science, emphasis on the achievement of communication efficacy or the ‗mutual manifestness‘between the communicator and the receptor. Bad on such a framework, the author ventures to propo veral strategies to translate puns, namely punning correspondence, parate explanation, change of the image, sacrifice of condary information and editorial means. The preconditions for the adoption of each strategy have also been described through in-depth analysis of different translated versions of the lected corpus with the aim of facilitating the translator‘s actual practice.
recycle是什么意思KEYWORDS十二月英语
Puns, Relevance Theory, translation strategy.
双赢思维1. Puns—Translatable or Not?
Punning is an ingenious u of homophonic and polymous phenomena of language with an intention to achieve special effects. As a rhetorical device with strong expressive power it is widely employed in all forms of linguistic communication, ranging from daily conversation to literary works, from advertiments to news reports, and from riddles to jokes. Since puns are most common in English and Chine, both abundant with monosyllables, a convenient medium for punning (Newmark 1988: 217), it is without doubt that a study on the translation of English and Chine puns is of great significance and affords much pleasure. However, studies on the translation of puns are quite scarce.
kiddyNewmark (1988: 217) outlines some general principles for the translation of different types of puns. For example, puns bad on Graeco-Latinisms with near-equivalents in SL and TL are the easiest to be translated, especially when they only embody a contrast between the words‘ literal and figurative meanings. ―If the purpo of the pun is merely to rai laughter, it can sometimes be ‗compensated‘ by another pun on a word with a different but associated meaning‖ out of ―exceptional ingenuity‖(ibid.). Puns in poems have to be sacrificed owing to the conflict between double meanings and the metrical requirement. Puns with more emphasis on the n rather than t
he witticism, e.g. a slip of the tongue or spoonerism, have to be explicated in both ns in the TL. The principles, though brief and sketchy, could be of some practical help to translators when dealing with puns. However, it is believed by Newmark
that ―[t]he translation of puns is of marginal importance‖ (ibid.), which might explain why he attaches this ction to the chapter of ―shorter items‖ of his book.
Among the few scholars committed to the study of puns and their translation, Dirk Delabastita undoubtedly holds a prominent place. Delabastita (1996: 134) propos nine strategies1 for the translation of puns and recognis that the significance of puns lies in their intention, i.e. they are meaningful only when intended to be so (1996: 131-132). But the different strategies propod for the translation of puns are more product-focud than process-oriented.
Crisafulli (1996) also discuss the conditions for the adoption of compensation in pun translation. But instead of providing a systematic acco unt of pun translation, his purpo is mainly to justify H. F. Cary‘s avoidance policy when translating Dante‘s puns in the Divine Comedy, giving consideration to the translator‘s ideology.
Comparing sporadic studies of the translation of puns, the voice on the untranslatability of puns e
ms to be much louder, which could mainly be accounted for by the following reasons.
Firstly, the status of puns is never a cure one. Over the centuries, puns have been struggling ―between acceptability and rejection, nonn and point, decency and obscenity‖ (Redfern 1984: 1). The u of puns flourished in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries when ―direct and formal combats of wit were a favourite pastime of the courtly and accomplished‖ (Coleridge 1969: 250). The high esteem of puns is fully demonstrated through their prevalence in various plays by Shakespeare, who employs puns to add vividness to his characters and build up dramatic effects. According to Manhood (1957: 164), the average number of puns in a Shakespearean play is venty-eight. But the status of puns was somewhat lowered in the eighteenth century when the style of writing in England was characterid by plainness. The nineteenth century saw a revival of puns by humorous writers, most noticeably Lewis Carroll, who famous novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland fascinates children and adults worldwide through its witty language, even today. However, despite Coleridge‘s efforts to justify Shakespeare‘s puns through psychological analysis, and Byron‘s atte mpts to revive Shakespearean wordplay (Manhood 1957: 11), puns continued to enjoy a low status in the nineteenth-century. China, on the other hand, does not boast renowned punsters like Shakespeare and Carroll, and Chine puns are traditionally hidden in folk riddles and two-part alleg
orical sayings. As a result, there is even less attention focud on Chine puns than on English ones. Puns in modern times are often applied in advertiments and news headlines to attract the precious attention of potential customers or readers, instead of being riously rearched. Therefore, the scattered studies on puns, either English or Chine, and their underlying mechanisms, have never
entered the mainstream of academia.
Secondly, the translation of puns has always been a hard nut to crack,
becau the double meanings of puns are always the combined effect of
phonological and mantic features, which can hardly be kept when transplanted into another language, especially tho belonging to different
families. The voices advocating the untranslatability of puns are not weak in the field of translation studies. Although Roman Jakobson (1959: 234), a strong supporter of universalism,2 claims that all cognitive experience can be conveyed in any existing language, and when there was a deficiency ―terminology may be qualified and amplified by loanwords or loan-translations, neologisms or ma
ntic shifts, and finally, by circumlocutions‖, he has to admit that poetry, over which the pun reigns, ―by definition is untranslatable‖ (1959: 238). J. C. Catford holds a more rational view of translatability, which ems to be ―a cline rather than a clear-cut dichotomy‖ (1965: 93). However, when classifying the limits of translatability into linguistic and cultural ones, he also conveniently puts puns under the former category: ―Linguistic untranslatability occurs typically in cas where an ambiguity peculiar to the SL text is a functionally relevant feature—e.g. in SL puns‖ (1965: 94). Reiss also states that ―In translation, puns and other kinds of play with language will have to be ignored to a great extent so as to keep the content invariant‖ (2000: 169). Gary Egan (1994: 2 in Veisbergs 1997: 163)3 is more pronounced when expressing his view on the translation of puns: ―being practically untranslatable […] puns effectively scotch the myth of universality.‖Such attitudes imply that there is no need to undertake thorough rearch into the translation of puns and that any attempt to translate puns is doomed to failure.
2. From Equivalence to Relevance
A clor look might reveal that traditional adherence to the untranslatability of puns is, to a great extent, the outcome of the unremitting arch for equivalence,4 which has always been a notion full of controversy. Firstly, equivalence enjoys a dual status both as the object of translation studies and
drum erroras a criterion for defining translation activity. Secondly, although different scholars interpret equivalence from different perspectives to find a way out of the absolute equation implied in the very term, be it dynamic equivalence (Nida 1964), or pragmatic equivalence (Koller 1989), the abstract notion of equivalence or equivalent effect is hard to evaluate, let alone rving as a yardstick in the asssment of translation works and in the decision-making process of translation practitioners.
To solve such a dilemma, one promising way, as perceived by the prent author, is to resort to Relevance Theory, developed by Sperber and Wilson in 1986 on the basis of cognitive science and the theory of pragmatics. Relevance Theory could best explain the ostensive inferentialbec中级报名费
communication, the success of which depends on the audience‘s recognition of the communicator‘s intentions5 bad on a shared cognitive environment in accordance with the principle of relevance.6 The theory
was applied to translation by Gutt (1991), who defines translation as
―interlingual interpretive u.‖The role of the translator is to ensure ―optimal relevance,‖i.e. ―an expectation on the part of the hearer that his attempt at interpretation will yield adequate contextual effects at minimal processing cost‖ (1991: 30).
Relevance Theory offers an empirical, cognition-bad explanation of translation. It could help us redefine the fundamental relation between a translation and its source text, which is bad not on equivalence, but on interpretive remblance. This promis greater freedom for the translator: there is simply no fixed norm of equivalence underlying ‗good‘ translation. Translation, when viewed from the perspective of communication conditioned by the principle of relevance, becomes a triploid interaction among the writer, the translator and the target reader instead of the traditional dichotomic focus on the producing end (the writer) and the receiving end (the reader) alone. Such openness embodied in Relevance Theory also promis a much larger scope for the translation of puns than that allowed by the ideal notion of equivalence. After the extraction of the writer‘s assumed intentions and careful asssmen t of the shared cognitive environment, the translator can then adopt various accommodative ways to recreate the special effects of puns intended by the original writer with the lowest possible processing effort on the reader‘s side. Thus, Relevance Theory provides a new perspective for viewing puns and their translation.
3. A Relevance-theoretic Account of Pun Translation
Relevance Theory provides a new perspective for viewing puns and their translation. Firstly, it highlights the importance of understanding the intentions of the punsters, which, as argued by the pr
ent author, can rve as the dividing line between punning and ambiguity. As mentioned above, there is an asymmetry between language and the objective world it denotes. ―The fact that people a nd trees and elephants and cars all have trunks just proves that there are more things than there are words‖ (Hughes and Hammond 1978 in Redfern 1984: 7). Such asymmetry is necessary for efficiency in linguistic communication, but it also gives ri to the phenomenon of ambiguity—a word, phra or ntence having more than one reference, which can result in different misunderstandings or even communication failure, and is thus best. Punning, on the other hand, is an intentional u of the ambiguous nature of language in order to achieve some special effects in specific contexts. The punning word or phra rves as a pivot to correlate two unrelated meanings into a unified entity and the role of the translator, according to Relevance Theory, is to invoke two interpretations in the cognitive environment of the target reader, who recognition of the punster‘s intention and the discovery of
汗译英the relevance of the two meanings are esntial for the success of communication. Hence, it is of paramount importance to probe into the underlying intentions behind puns in order to form a better understanding
of this distinctive linguistic phenomenon.
Secondly, Relevance Theory falsifies the untranslatability of puns. Owing
cwto the unique features of puns, namely, two meanings crowded in homophonic or polymous words or phras for some special effects, it is impossible, except on extremely rare occasions, to achieve equivalence or equivalent effects of both the lexical and mantic aspects between the ST and the TT. This is becau a polymous word in the source language might not be polymous or may entail entirely different emotive or stylistic meanings in the receptor language, and becau there are also interlingual differences on the phonological level. However, it does not mean that puns are untranslatable and that the translator could conveniently give up the effort to translate puns. It is emphasid by Relevance Theory that translation is a kind of verbal communication, the success of which depends on the audienc e‘s recognition of the communicator‘s intention through the inferential model rather than the mechanic transplant of the linguistic codes. Since the purpo of the source writer in adopting the rhetoric device of punning is to express some implicit meanings or to provide the reader with some special aesthetic enjoyment through the ingenious u of puns, the faithfulness to the exact wording or the ntence structure is, in comparison, not so important and can be sacrificed to some extent in the ca of a conflict of choices. Bad on Relevance Theory the central concern of the translator is not to achieve some fixed standard of ‗equivalence,‘but rather successfu
cofeel communication, or the identification of what the translator intends to communicate to the target reader. To achieve this, the translator can adopt various accommodative means to recreate the intended effects of the source writer that can be appreciated by the target reader.
Finally, Relevance Theory provides us with a new theoretical framework to
guide the translation of puns from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics. Notions like optimal relevance, cognitive environment, contextual effects and processing efforts are effective tools for the translator to infer the intention of the source writer and the accessibility of that intention by the target reader. In addition, Relevance Theory can help us evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of different translation strategies and prescribe the conditions for the adoption of each strategy. This would undoubtedly facilitate the decision-making process and the asssment of pun translation.
Bad on the above analysis, this paper will illustrate, from the perspective of Relevance Theory, four strategies on the translation of puns by analysing some examples with different translated versions.
