Functional Approaches And Drama Translation For The Stage

For a long time,drama translation,especially drama translation for the stage,has not received due attention from scholars in the field of translation studies.Literary translators tend to equate drama translation with literary translation in a general sense, which obscures the dual nature of drama translation,namely,readability and performability.Even those few translation theorists who are interested in drama translation per se are still debating on whether readability or performability should be used as the most important criterion by which the quality of drama translation is evaluated.The author of this thesis believes that Functional Approaches to translation can shed light on the debate and discussion concerning standards of drama translation for different purposes.The present thesis is an attempt to explore the implications of Functional Approaches for drama translation.The hypothesis of this research is that Functional Approaches can inspire and guide translators in their practice of drama translation.To support this hypothesis,this author conducts a contrastive study of two Chinese versions of Death of a Salesman,one of which was translated by Ying Ruocheng and the other by Chen Liangting.The thesis consists of four chapters.Chapter One is a brief introduction to the background of this study,the objective of this research and the organization of this thesis.Chapter Two begins with a brief survey of the relevant literature on theoretical researches in drama study and practice in drama translation both at home and abroad. Distinct features that differentiate drama translation from literary translation in a general sense,such as linguistic features and other features,are discussed.Chapter Three begins with an introduction to the background of the Functional Approaches.In the West,two researchers on drama translation have carried out significant and influential studies which boosted the recognition of Functional Approaches by translation theorists and practitioners.One is Eugene Nida,who formulates "equivalence theory";the other is Peter Newmark,who proposes "communicative translation theory".The latter part of this chapter is devoted to discussions on such concepts as "skopos","aim","purpose","intention","function",relations between "intratextual coherence" and "intertextual coherence","culture","culture-specificity", "role of text classification",and "function plus loyalty".Chapter Four focuses on a case study.Hypothesizing that performability is the most important criterion in evaluating drama translation,the author conducts a contrastive study of the aforementioned Chinese versions of Death of a Salesman translated,respectively,by Ying Ruocheng and Chen Liangting.The contrastive study is carried out with special attention to the following aspects of drama translation:culture-specific items, metaphors and similes,colloquialism,and actability.The last part of this thesis is a summary of this research.The contribution of this study to the research on drama translation is the rationalization of the suggestion that translators should cooperate with experts on performance so as to produce high-quality drama translations with greater suitability for performance on the stage.