Abstract:

English Humor, as an important part in its language, can display people's habits and customs in English countries. It is not very easy but necessary to translate English humor to Chinese appropriately. This paper first introduces the definition and features of English humor, and then the functions of humor. The main part of this paper is the translation of English humor. In most cases, English humor is translatable and the translators can reproduce the humor in the target language. Sometimes, English humor is untranslatable. The untranslatability of English humor may be caused by the differences in pronunciation and characters or in culture. When we translate English humor, we need to use some different strategies to make the versions equivalent to the original. In this paper, the author mainly discusses two strategies which are foreignization and domestication. Foreignization can introduce the ways of expressing humor in English, from which readers can know about its different culture. Domestication shifts the expressions of English humor to the Chinese ways, and can make the humor more acceptable and understandable. When translating English humor, translators should use these two strategies according to specific situations.

Keywords: humor; translatability and untranslatability;foreignization; domestication

摘 要：

英语幽默是英语中很重要的一部分，它可以展示出说英语国家中人们的习惯和习俗。把英语幽默恰当地翻译成中文是一件并不容易但是很必要的事情。这篇论文首先介绍了英语幽默的定义和特点以及幽默的功能。这篇论文主要部分是英语幽默的翻译。在多数情况下，英语幽默是可译的，并且翻译者能够将幽默翻译成目的语。有时，英语幽默是不可译的。英语幽默的不可译可能是由发音和字形的不同或者文化的不同。当我们翻译英语幽默的时候，我们需要使用不同的策略去让译文与原文相符。在这篇论文中作者主要讨论了两种策略，它们是异化于归化。异化能够介绍在英语中幽默的表达方式，从中读者能够了解到它的不同文化。归化是将英语幽默的表达方式转变成中文的表达方式，这样能够使英语幽默变得更加可接受与易懂。当翻译英语幽默的时候，译者应该根据具体的情况去使用这两种翻译策略。

关键词：幽默；可译性与不可译性;异化；归化

1 Introduction
    Humor exists everywhere. It exists in everyday conversation, and in the political speeches, diplomatic activities, business negotiations. It may increase joy, happiness and love to our life. A sense of humor sometimes may break the embarrassment, build a bridge to communicate with each other and make people feel closer and more easygoing. Nowadays, more and more scholars pay more attention to the research of English humor translation, which becomes more and more popular.
2 The definition of humor
    The term of “humor” has been used for centuries. Originally, the meaning of humor was” liquid”, “moisture” or “fluid”. Then, it contained the meaning of a mood quality. Humor was the condition of being in a cheerful and amiable mood” in the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary in 1616. A sense of humor can be defined as the ability to perceive one or more of the universal characteristics. Therefore, one’s sense of humor involves the capacity to appreciate incongruity, absurdity, an unexpected future, a pleasant surprise, a startle, getting it and/or emotional chaos remembered in tranquility. In Webster’S Third New International Dictionary，humor is defined as “the quality which appeals to a sense of the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous；the mental faculty of discovering，expressing，or appreciating the ludicrous or absurdly incongruous.”