On Drama Translation From The Perspective Of Horizon Of Expectations

Nowadays, people all over the world luxuriate in an unprecedented material prosperity and long for brilliant culture as well as diversified entertainment to enrich their spiritual life. Drama, with many other fine arts exclusive to the upper class in the past centuries, nowadays has come to the middle of the broad masses. The ever-increasing desire for foreign cultures by people at home promote the development of drama translation, which in turn brings the drama translation studies out of the "forgotten corner" and attracts the attention of the scholars. But drama, different from other literary genre, is a comprehensive form of art with its unique dualistic nature:performability and readability, which are major hindrance in its translation. Even though very few papers and monographs can be found regarding this field, there are still a number of scholars at home and abroad who have made gratifying achievements. Many translators, such as Zhu Shenghao, Ying Ruocheng and Yu Guangzhong, have translated a lot of great works and some of them have been presented on the stage. And some Western scholars, based on their long-time translation practice and studies, conclude some translation principles and strategies and strived to get out from the "Labyrinth" as Susan Bassnett calls drama translation. The development of literary theoretical research starts from focusing on the authors, to the text, and then to the readers and during this process a number of academic schools took shape and a series of theories emerged. Reception aesthetics, also called reception theory, is a kind of reader-oriented theory which was born in Germany in the late sixties of the 20th century, reached its climax in the seventies and soon became popular throughout the literary circle in Europe and the United States, and was introduced into China in the 1980s, and now its impact has been far beyond its original realm and infiltrated into various literary fields. With its theoretical base as phenomenology aesthetics and hermeneutic aesthetics, reception aesthetics emphasizes the importance of interaction between readers and literary works, and it holds that literary works are meaningless without reading. "Horizon of Expectations", a core theory of reception aesthetics, refers to the preliminary estimation and expectation toward literary works by recipients based on their own reading experiences and aesthetic propensity. There is an aesthetic distance between reader's former horizon of expectations and artistic quality of literary works. New works can be easily accepted only if it satisfies the readers'expectations, otherwise, the readers should adjust or develop their horizon of expectations to comprehend the works. Recipients' horizon of expectations is not static. Each time we appreciate a new work, we are subjected by our former horizon of expectations, but meanwhile, we develop and broaden our horizon of expectations because good works always involve new ideas and provide us different aesthetic experiences.In this thesis, the author attempts to make a tentative study on drama translation from the perspective of "Horizon of Expectations" and employs abundant exemplifications from those translations of Oscar Wilde's play The Importance of Being Earnest to testify the applicability of this theory to guide drama translation. There are several translated versions of The Importance of Being Earnest, among them only Yu Guangzhong's version has put on stage and achieved great success. By comparing the versions translated by Yu Guangzhong and other translators we can conclude that Yu's success rests in his full consideration of the audiences'horizon of expectations as well as their aesthetic experience.