On The Principle Of Performability In Drama Translation From The Perspective Of SAT

Drama translation is a special field of literary translation. The study of drama translation is a comparatively less explored area characterized by a serious lack of guiding theory. Since drama had the dual natures of a literary art and a theatrical art, drama translation is more complex and faces more challenges than the translation of other literary genres. Whether drama translation should be reading-oriented or performance-oriented is still a controversial issue.Speech act theory, which studies the daily usage of language from the perspective of philosophy, is a very important theory in social linguistics and pragmatics. To be simple, it is the study of how to do things with words. Speech act theory plays a very important role in translation. The specialty of drama lies in the fact that it relies on the dialogue to create the characters and put forward the plot; therefore, the translation of the dramatic dialogue undertakes heavier tasks. The stage lines are full of action and the utterances of characters are of intense intentionality. The characters perform acts in their utterances. This is the central idea of Speech act theory. It involves the speaker's intention in making utterance.However, there is no monograph on how to apply the speech act theory to drama translation. In view of the existing problems in the study of drama translation, it is necessary to find some relevant principles to guide the stage-oriented drama translation. This thesis applies speech act theory, one of the basic theories of pragmatics, to drama translation with special reference to Ying Ruocheng's translation of Death of a Salesman. By analyzing the dialogues between characters, it discusses the feasibility of the application of speech act theory to the stage-oriented drama translation. According to Ying Ruocheng's statement in the preface to his translation of Death of a Salesman, the author summarizes his ideas and points out four principles of performability in drama translation, namely, the principle of live language, the principle of immediate effect, the principle of gestic language and the principle of characterization. It aims to providing directions for how to reproduce a performable target text on the stage. By attaching great importance to the illocutionary force of the utterances of characters, it hopes to help people get a better understanding of the term'performability'.