A Multi - Modal Perspective On The Translation Of Kun Opera

Kunqu opera of China was listed among the first group of Masterpieces of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity by UNESCO in 2001. It stands for the artistic zenith that Chinese traditional operas have ever reached. Kunqu opera is a comprehensive art with literature, music, dance, performance, make-up, costume and prop as its components, thus characterized by multimodality. Most Kunqu operas are considered as Chinese masterpieces, the translation of which will help enhance the soft power of China.However, the translation of Kunqu opera and the study on it are barely satisfactory at present. Among 102 Kunqu operas only about 20 have been translated to foreign languages, most of which are episodes or compiled versions. Only a few are complete translations. Few studies on the translation of Kunqu opera have been found overseas. In China, although some researchers are related to it, their analyses, with no differentiation with other literary works, only focus on the script rather than the multimodal features of Kunqu opera.Multimodal discourse analysis sprang up in the western world in 1990 s. It has been introduced to China since about ten years, but domestic studies on it chiefly focus on evaluating, explaining, reviewing and testing its explanatory power without critical research. None of them applies it to the study of theatre or theatrical translation. It has been a crying need for the application of this western theory to the solving of Chinese linguistic problems.Kunqu Opera is characterized by multimodality, while translation returns to language and text. From the perspective of multimodal discourse analysis, both the textual meaning and multimodal information of the original text should be conveyed in the target text. We conduct a comparative study on English translations of The Peony Pavilion from this perspective. We choose five English translations of them: Cyril Birch’s, Zhang Guangqian’s, Wang Rongpei’s, Li Linde’s and Wang Ban’s versions. According to the nature of multimodality in language, music and performance of Kunqu opera and referring to the grammar of visual design created by Gunther Kress and Theo Van Leeuwen as well as the grammar of the principles designed by Theo Van Leeuwen in his book Speech, Music, Sound, we compare the five English versions of The Peony Pavilion mainly from the perspective of visual modality and auditive modality. The research approaches we take here are multimodal discourse analysis, documentary analysis, sampling, comparative study, evaluation and interdisciplinary research. By case study we find that five translators all pay some attention to the multimodal information in the original text, including visual signs such as scenery, color, visual classical allusion, rhetorical devices, gesture and action and auditive signs such as rhyme, rhythm, reduplication, modal particle, rhetorical devices and key image, and convey them in their respective translations.We propose to abandon the binary opposition of drama translation——translation of closet drama and that of staged drama,and go back to the essential nature of Kunqu opera——multimodality. Considering the characteristics of Kunqu opera and its translation, we come up with the term “double distortions”. The first distortion refers to the meaning loss in the transferring of modalities, and the second distortion refers to the meaning loss in the changing of languages. In order to avoid such losses in the translation of Kunqu opera, we create a multimodal translation framework of Kunqu opera with the main principles of recognizing multimodal signs in the original text and recontextualizing such signs in the target text. In this framework, visual signs include gesture and action, color, information value, image and foregrounding; auditive signs include meter, melody and pronunciation. Recontextualization is divided into four steps: selection, sorting and choosing, foregrounding and considering for the audience.