On Equivalence In Drama Translation

Thunderstorm, as one of the most famous dramas of Chinese literature, is distinguished not only for its significant content, but also for its language and culture features. The author Cao Yu chooses expressions with strong Chinese linguistic and cultural features, whose means endow Thunderstorm with high aesthetic value, but they also enhance the difficulty of translation.From a dialectical perspective, most translation theorists consider that equivalence in drama translation is merely an ideal to strive for, but difficult to attain, and very often is realized only to certain degree. So equivalence, as it is, is merely a matter of degree, it is impossible to achieve absolute equivalence in drama translation. How to handle or deal with some salient barriers caused by stylistic, cultural and linguistic untranslatability in drama becomes a crucial and indispensable issue for translators.The object of the translation in practice determines that translating the text of different genres must follow different translation rules. This thesis analyzes the characteristics of drama translation, putting forward the principle that drama translation should achieve style, culture and language equivalence, and drama translation should arouse the roughly similar response from the audience of the original language, and of the translated text, and further discusses the translation modification for the two languages equivalence. Thunderstorm, one of excellent Chinese dramas, is featured by its distinction of personal colloquial, implicit style and the abundant connotations of culture. This present thesis on Wang Zuoliang's English version of Thunderstorm is guided by the equivalence theory. The research findings show that style, culture and language are the primary sides forequivalence.This thesis consists of three chapters besides introduction and conclusion.Introduction briefly introduces the theme and the basic structure of this thesis.In Chapter One, I focus on equivalence translation theories and analyze drama's features, and draw a conclusion: drama translation should achieve style, culture and language equivalence and these three levels of equivalence are the concretion of affinity in essence and the concretion of equivalence effect.Chapter Two introduces the literary accomplishment of Thunderstorm, the literary status of Cao Yu, the author, and the translation theory of Wang Zuoliang, the translator of Thunderstorm.Chapter Three probes into how faithfulness to the original text in form and spirit is attained. Accordingly the conclusion is proved: style equivalence, culture equivalence and language equivalence are the basic principles of drama translation.Conclusion puts forward that appropriate criteria and techniques should be adopted to achieve equivalence in translation in terms of the style, culture and language. To achieve the three levels of equivalence, translators of drama are required to study the source drama with great efforts and equip themselves with both bilingual and bicultural competence and take great pains to reduce the loss and distortion of style, culture and language in the source text.