A Study On Ying Ruocheng's Translation Of Death Of A Salesman From Adaptation Theory

Drama is a dramatic work intended for performance by actors on a stage or the literary genre of works intended for the theater, and in the present thesis"drama"is adopted to refer generally to either the literature text for reading or the dramatic text for performance (with audience in a theater as the receptor). Drama translation is the translation of the dramatic text from one language and culture into another or the transposition of the original and translated or adapted text onto the stage. As drama translation is more and more becoming a key element for the cross-cultural communication of the world, more and more scholars have paid attention to the study on drama translation. Ying's translation of Death of a Salesman has been considered to be the good model for drama translation because of Ying Ruocheng's special identity of being a director, actor and translator as well as the great success of the performance of Death of a Salesman in China.Adaptation theory was first put forward by Belgian scholar Jef Verschueren in 1987 and later on Verschueren enriched and modified his theory many times. Since then various studies have been done on Adaptation Theory at home and abroad, making this theory more and more popular and modified. After the introduction into China, Adaptation Theory has become a very influential pragmatic theory in Chinese linguistic circle. Many domestic scholars have adopted the theory into their own research areas, using Adaptation Theory to analyze the practical questions, such as the study on Adaptation Theory and translation, Adaptation Theory and pragmatic strategies, Adaptation Theory and foreign language teaching, and so on, among which the exploration on the application of the Adaptation Theory in the translation field takes almost a half. And those studies have contributed a lot to the development and perfection of pragmatic translation studies. In his Adaptation Theory, Verschueren holds that language use is a continuous process of choice-making and variability, negotiability and adaptability are the three properties of language in use, besides, the four investigation angles of language in use are contextual correlates of adaptation, structural objects of adaptation, dynamics of adaptation and salience of the adaptation process. For translation is an activity which involves the communication between two languages and cultures, the Adaptation Theory could be used to explore the translation process. That is to say, translation is also a process of choice-making, having the three properties of variability, negotiability and adaptability and can also be studied from the corresponding four investigation angles.According to Verschueren, the dynamics of adaptation is the central task of most specific pragmatic investigations, and the dynamics concerns the nature and development over time of the relationship between context and structure (Verschueren, 2000: 68). Therefore, this thesis has been trying to study the adaptation process at different levels of language structure, taking the specific words or sentences from the source text and their corresponding translations as examples. In the light of Adaptation Theory, the contextual correlates of adaptability are roughly classified into communicative context and linguistic context. The communicative context could be analyzed from three aspects which are the mental world, social world, physical world which can be seen as static extralinguistic realities, while the linguistic context is the other aspect of the contextual correlates of adaptability in which cohesion, intertextuality and sequencing should be studied.Many scholars have ever studied Ying's translation of Death of a Salesman from various different angles such as the functionalism perspective, the perspective of manipulation theory, the perspective of reception theory as well as the perspective of cultural diffusion; however, seldom have people used Adaptation Theory to study its explanatory power over drama translation. Therefore, the present thesis is to explore Ying's translation of Death of a Salesman with Adaptation Theory put forward by Verschueren as its macro-guidance, with the aim of confirming that drama translation could be analyzed and studied by Adaptation Theory, hoping that studying drama translation from the Adaptation Theory will open up a new situation for both the development of the theory itself and the improvement of the drama translation study.This thesis includes five chapters. Chapter 1 is the introduction; chapter 2 is the literature review about the study on Adaptation Theory as well as the study on Ying's Death of a Salesman at home and abroad; chapter 3 is the theoretical foundation which gives a detailed explanation about Adaptation Theory, and based on this theory the specific working framework of the thesis is put forward in this chapter; chapter 4 is the core of the whole thesis in which the case study and analysis of the application of Adaptation Theory in Ying Ruocheng's Translation of Death of a Salesman is carried out, providing? an in-depth exploration into the various adaptation aspects in the dramatic text's translation process, with specific examples taken from the source and target texts. The study is mainly carried out in two sections. Firstly, the study on adaptation to communicative context in the translation is carried out. The author takes the translation of interjections"Jesus"and"Gee"as examples from the source and target texts in order to illustrate the adaptation process of the mental world, takes the translation of address forms"boy"and"kid"as examples to illustrate the adaptation process of social world and the translation of the culture-loaded names and phrases as examples to illustrate the adaptation process of physical world. Secondly, the study on adaptation to linguistic context in the translation is carried out, including three aspects which are respectively the adaptation to contextual cohesion, adaptation to sentence order as well as adaptation to sentence patterns; chapter 5 is the conclusion of the whole thesis, and the findings and the limitations of this thesis as well as some suggestions for future research are presented. Through the whole studying process, the present thesis is hoped to confirm that in Ying's translation of Death of a Salesman, the choice-making and adaptation process could be found at all levels of the text structure, proving the explanatory power of Adaptation Theory over drama translation with convincing study on specific examples taken from the source and target texts.