A Study On The Translation Strategies Of Performance-oriented Drama Texts

Different from fiction and poetry, drama has the dualistic nature as both a literary art for readers and a theatrical art for stage performance. This complex nature of drama determines the peculiarity of drama translation: during the process of translating, the translator must take into account drama as a performing art, such as the factors of time and space constraints, immediacy, instantaneousness and colloquialism, etc.. However, studies from this perspective to discuss the translation strategies of drama are far from enough. Drama translation studies for a long time, concentrates mainly on readability and performability; thus, its translation strategies are usually discussed from the perspective of this central problem: should the drama text be translated within the literary system for a reading public (reader-oriented), or should it be translated as one element in the theatre discourse as a whole (performance-oriented)? However, the ultimate goal of drama is for stage performances; except for closet drama, the author of the original drama has inevitably taken into account the stage effects of the works during the course of creating drama. Similarly, drama translation should also take into account audiences, important participants in the theatre. Whether the audiences understand and accept the performance largely depends on the translation. This thesis compares Ying Ruocheng's translated version and Lin Haozhuang's of Major Barbara to explore better translation strategies for performance-oriented drama texts from audiences'perspectives with the relevance theory as theoretical support.Major Barbara, a three-act play of Bernard Shaw, is rich in cultural information and the distinctive personalities are reflected in language. How to successfully convey the information and present the personalities of the characters plays a crucial role in the drama performance. This thesis compares the two Chinese versions of Major Barbara (two most influential versions) to explore the following two questions: (1) what are Ying's and Lin's translation strategies respectively? (2) What translation strategies are more suitable for on-stage drama translation?This thesis is to explore the better translation strategies for on-stage drama with relevance theory as the supporting theory. The core concept of relevance theory is optimal relevance and the pursuit of optimal relevance is to make readers or audiences to get the maximum contextual effects with the minimum processing effort. The author uses the relevance theory as theoretical support as performance-oriented drama translation also needs to make the audience spend the minimum processing efforts getting the maximum contextual effects to appreciate the drama, due to time and space constraints, immediacy and instantaneousness, etc.. By a comparative study of Ying's and Lin's versions and from the use of large number of footnotes in Lin's and Ying's claim that why he did the retranslation of a series of drama texts including Major Barbara, the author of the thesis makes a hypothesis that Ying's version is more suitable for performance. In addition, the translation strategies employed by Ying and Lin are presented. Furthermore, a questionnaire is presented and the results of the questionnaire are also given to prove the hypothesis, based on which the conclusion is drawn---the translation strategies used in Ying's version are more suitable for performance-oriented drama translation.