On Drama Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Drama is a fruit of human civilization and a comprehensive form of art. This"stage art"shapes figures and reflects cultural and social life by employing different measures, such as literature, performance, music, art design. The dramatic text belongs to one of the distinctive literary genres, combining the literary features of novels, poems, essays, and inherits a specific duality: on the one hand, it is the source text for performance; on the other hand, it is a literature work for appreciation, i.e. it inherits both performability and readability. Thus, the translation standard for drama is distinctive from that of other literary genres, like novel or poem, which shall be determined by the objectives and features of the drama.Within the literary translation field, the translation for fiction, poem and essays have enjoyed great popularity with a number of translation work, comments and research studies while only limited scholarly attention has been paid to drama translation. Susan Bassnett is one of the scholars involved in drama translation theory studies. Besides, translation of the classic dramatic work of William Shakespeare has become popular among scholars and audience and received deep investigation while that of Oscar Wilde has not bee paid corresponding attention. As a matter of fact, several of his classics, especially The Importance of Being Earnest, had already enjoyed popularity in Britain in the 19th century. Among the three Chinese translation versions, however, only that of Yu Guangzhong's has been put on stage successfully. Hence, the drama translation principle and strategies adopted by Yu deserve further and deeper investigation for such a huge success.The German functionalist translation theory is a theoretical translation system directed by Skopos theory, which is target-culture-oriented and aims at the equivalent function of the translation instead of focusing on linguistic equivalence only. Under the theoretical framework of Skopos theory, the author conducts a contrastive analysis on the three translation versions of The Importance of Being Earnest by Qian Zhide, Yu Guangzhong and Zhang Nanfeng respectively, and summarizes the three different translation strategies adopted by them. Qian adopted literal translation basically out of interest; Yu principally adopted free translation strategy, characterizing with performability and audience-orientedness, which enables its successful stage performance while Zhang almost fully carries out free translation strategy and has seldom maintained the source culture. Thus, through the investigation of these translation examples from the aspect of the three dominant rules of Skopos theory as well as cultural specifics, the author demonstrates that Skopos theory is applicable to drama translation and concludes the strategies and principle of drama translation from the perspective of Skopos Theory.