臺灣博碩士論文加值系統

Conventional approaches to translation performance assessment often focus on the fidelity and fluency of translations. The results of these assessments are drawn from assessors’ subjectivity and may lack significance in the practical field.
This study aimed at assessing comic translation performances from readers’ points of view in order to provide translators with practical knowledge of readers’ preferences.
The corpus consisted of ten randomly selected volumes of the 2006 bilingual edition of Garfield comics published by Shuang Da publishing house, translated into Chinese by Ding-Qi Zhang. The comic strips were classified into categories of universal, cultural, and linguistic humor, and were examined for the translation strategies used, namely direct translation, annotation, and paraphrasing. One comic strip from each category of humor was then selected and translated into three versions using the above translation strategies. These translated versions of comic strips were made into questionnaires and participants were asked to provide a score for these comic strips according to their reading pleasure preferences. The quantitative data of preference scores were examined for their correlations with the humor categories and translation strategies. The relationships between the three were also inspected.

The major findings were as follow:
1. From the present corpus, 86% of the universal humor is translated directly, while only 18% of the cultural and linguistic humor is directly translated.
2. A significant effect of humor categories on reader preferences was found, showing that readers hold a stronger preference towards universal humor.
3. A significant effect of translation strategies on reader preferences was found, showing that readers hold a stronger preference towards paraphrasing and direct translation.
4. A significant interaction between humor categories and translation strategies was found, showing that readers prefer direct translation for universal humor, paraphrasing for cultural and linguistic humor.
5. Comprehension was found to be the top priority factor that governs readers’ reading preferences and that excessive interpretation from the translator was found unnecessary.
6. Direct translation was sufficient to translate universal humor in terms of humor comprehension, but insufficient to translate cultural or linguistic humor.

ABSTRACT I
摘要 III
TABLE OF CONTENTS IV
LIST OF TABLES VIII
LIST OF FIGURES IX
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1
1.1. BACKGROUND AND MOTIVATION 1
1.2. STATEMENT OF PROBLEM 3
1.3. RESEARCH OBJECTIVES 5
1.4. RESEARCH QUESTIONS 6
1.5. RESEARCH METHODOLOGY 7
1.6. TERM DEFINITION 9
CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW 10
2.1. HUMOR 11
2.1.1. DEFINITION OF HUMOR 11
2.1.2. THE STUDY OF HUMOR 12
2.1.3. CLASSIFICATION OF HUMOROUS ELEMENTS 22
2.1.4. BARRIERS OF HUMOR PERCEPTION 26
2.2. TRANSLATION OF HUMOR 28
2.2.1. HUMOR IN ENGLISH 29
2.2.2. THE THOERIES OF EQUIVALENCE CONCEPT 32
2.2.3. LIMITATIONS AND UNTRANSLATABILITY OF HUMOR 35
2.2.4. THE FUNCTIONALIST APPROACH 41
2.2.5. THE SKOPOS THEORY 47
2.2.6. HUMOR TRANSLATION STRATEGIES 51
2.3. COMICS AND TRANSLATION 58
2.3.1. DEFINITION OF COMICS 59
2.3.2. THE COMIC MEDIUM 60
2.3.3. CHALLENGES AND STRATEGIES FOR TRANSLATING COMICS 62
2.4. READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM 67
2.5. SUMMARY 70
CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGY 71
3.1. RESEARCH DESIGN 71
3.1.1. PHASE 1 71
3.1.2. PHASE 2 72
3.1.3. PHASE 3 72
3.1.4. PHASE 4 73
3.2. RESEARCH METHOD 75
3.3. MATERIALS AND PARTICIPANTS 77
3.3.1. MATERIALS 77
3.3.2. PARTICIPANTS 82
3.4. QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGN 84
3.5. RESEARCH PROCEDURES 87
3.6. PILOT TESTING 96
3.7. DATA ANALYSIS 97
3.7.1. VARIABLES 97
3.7.2. STATISTICAL TREATMENT 97
3.8 SUMMARY 99
CHAPTER 4 RESULTS AND DISCUSSIONS 100
4.1. A SURVEY OF THE CURRENT TEXTS 100
4.2. QUESTIONNAIRE FINDINGS 104
4.2.1. BACKGROUND INFORMATION ON PARTICIPANTS 104
4.2.2. READING PREFERENCES REGARDING TRANSLATION STRATEGIES 105
4.2.3. FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE READING PLEASURE 109
4.2.4. ATTITUDE TOWARDS READING ANNOTATIONS 110
4.3. ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION 111
4.3.1. ANALYSIS OF TRANSLATION STRATEGIES EMPLOYED 111
4.3.2. ANALYSIS OF READING PREFERENCES BETWEEN HUMOR TYPES 113
4.3.3. FACTORS THAT INFLUENCE THE READING PLEASURE OF GARFIELD 118
4.3.4. ATTITUDE TOWARDS READING ANNOTATIONS 119
4.3.5. SUMMARY 120
4.4. INTERVIEW FINDINGS AND ANALYSIS 120
4.4.1. PREFERENCES FOR TRANSLATION STRATEGIES AND REASONS 121
4.4.2. COMPREHENSION OF HUMOROUS ELEMENTS 124
4.4.3. SUMMARY 125
CHAPTER 5 CONCLUSION 127
5.1. TRANSLATION STRATEGIES EMPLOYED IN THE GARFIELD COMICS 127
5.2. THE EFFECTS OF TRANSLATION STRATEGIES ON READING PLEASURE 128
5.3. READING COMPREHENSION OF HUMOROUS ELEMENTS 130
5.4. LIMITATIONS AND DELIMITATIONS 131
5.5. FURTURE STUDIES 134
REFERENCES 135
APPENDIX I - QUALITATIVE QUESTIONNAIRE 141
APPENDIX II – COMIC STRIPS USED FOR THE INTERVIEW 157
APPENDIX III – INTERVIEW QUESTIONNAIRE OUTLINE 162
APPENDIX IV – INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPTION 164


LIST OF TABLES
Table 4-1: Translation strategies employed in universal humor 101
Table 4-2: Translation strategies employed in cultural humor 101
Table 4-3: Translation strategies employed in linguistic humor 102
Table 4-4: Questionnaire participants 105
Table 4-5: Points given to each translation strategy by participants 106
Table 4-6: ANOVA table of effects of humor types and stranslation strategies 108
Table 4-7: Factors that influence reading pleasure of Garfield comics 110
Table 4-8: Readers’ attitude toward reading annotations 110
Table 4-9: Interview findings of reading preferences 121
Table 4-10: Interview findings of reading preferences and reasons 123
Table 4-11: Comprehension of humorous elements 125
Table 4-12: Solutions to incomprehensible humor 125



LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 2-1: Garfield comic strip 17
Figure 2-2: Hierarchical organization of Knowledge Resources 21
Figure 2-3: The integration of humor theories 21
Figure 2-4: Garfield comic strip 23
Figure 2-5: Intertextual relations in translation 46
Figure 2-6: Two opposite versions of comics 60
Figure 2-7: Garfield comic strip 64
Figure 2-8: Garfield comic strip 66
Figure 2-9: Garfield comic strip 67
Figure 3-1: Research method structure 74
Figure 3-2 Garfield comic strip 78
Figure 3-3 Garfield comic strip 79
Figure 3-4 Garfield comic strip 79
Figure 3-5: Research procedures 95
Figure 4-1: Interaction between humor and translation strategies on reading preferences 117

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