Performability In Drama Translation For Theatriclal Presence

As an ancient stage art, drama is a shining pearl among human culture. However, academic study on drama translation lags far behind poetry and novel translation because of its particular requirement on stage performance. Susan Bassnett, a British theorist on literary translation, stands out in the area of drama translation due to her original views and fruitful research. In early 1980s, Bassnett advocated creatively performability as translation criterion; afterwards, she denied the performability and maintained drama translation back to the linguistic structure of text. The writer of this thesis believes that the ultimate goal and aesthetic value of drama text depends on the stage performance, which would not be realized without audience participation. Therefore, the thesis analyzes and sorts out Susan Bassnett's views, then tentatively proposes a new criterion of drama translation: faithfulness as a prioritized requirement, drama translation should also take into account the performability as well as audience acceptance.The whole thesis is divided into six parts. Introduction presents the study subject and structure of the thesis. Chapter One gives an overview of the definition and composition of drama. In Chapter Two the writer briefly reviews the research on drama translation at home and abroad as well as probes into Susan Bassnett's views in different periods. Inspired by Bassnett's views, the writer in Chapter Three tentatively proposes a new criterion for drama translation, and discusses faithfulness, performability as well as response and acceptance of the audience as specified requirements of the new criterion. Chapter Four focuses on example analysis on good Chinese-English dramas at the linguistic and cultural level with the new criterion; meanwhile, specific strategies to handle the language and culture-loaded phenomena in drama translation are discussed and summarized. The last part concludes that: performability and audience factor are crucial to reproduce a drama's stage effects and the new criterion the writer proposed is feasible in drama translation practice.