On The Style Translation Of English Drama From The Perspective Of Literary Stylistics

This thesis mainly focuses on the stylistic analysis of dramatic text and its stylistic translation. Drama performance can be traced back to the age of ancient Greece and Rome, but dramatic text analysis and its translation studies are far from sufficient, compared with other literary genres—poetry and fiction which are equipped with powerful theoretical foundations and critical traditions. Within the relatively disvalued research concerning drama translation, much emphasis has been put on the performance outcome rather than the dramatic text itself, where comes the original motivation of the writing of this thesis.As far as the dramatic text analysis is concerned, literary stylistics offers a powerful theoretical framework. Professor Shen Dan of Beijing University has made great contribution to this. Her focus is fictional translation not drama translation. In her study of fictional translation, she mainly solved the problem of aesthetic value loss resulted from the translator's distortion of the thematically or artistically motivated choices made by the original author. The same problem exists in drama translation and there are many overlapping areas between drama translation and fictional translation. So this thesis borrows Shen Dan's theoretical framework concerning literary stylistics and fictional translation, aiming at making a functionally equivalent drama translation that preserves and reproduces as many aesthetic qualities as the original.This thesis explores the translation of dramatic text from three perspectives--poetic, fictional and dialogue analysis, for the fact that drama belongs to the whole literary family and has similar characteristics with poetic and fictional texts. Meanwhile it has its own unique features. Stylistic theories concerning the analysis of poetry and fiction and their translation offer powerful and mature theoretical backings for this thesis. In the related sections, this thesis analyzes the poetic features of dramatic language such as rhythmical language and iconicity of phonological devices. It also analyzes the fictional features of dramatic language such as illogicality, objectivity of the author's point of view, register, lexical and syntactic iconicity, etc. and the dramatic or aesthetic meanings are discussed after analysis of each feature, then it evaluates the translation of those stylistic forms of the original in the target language. In addition to poetic and fictional characteristics, drama has its own distinguished feature which is called performability. A drama is for performing fundamentally, not just being read on the page. So exploring the dramatic features is a constituent of this thesis. Dramastylistics—a branch of literary stylistics is applied in this session. Dramastylistics emphasizes the context in which the language is used and its pragmatic meaning. Different linguistic forms will utter different pragmatic effects. So in this section, the pragmatic effects of the original drama are analyzed and their translation in the chosen version evaluated. Finally, it proposes some tips for drama translation in those aspects.