Pragmatic Analysis Of Drama Translation

Drama translation is an important branch of literary translation. It is quite different from fiction translation and poetry translation. Every text-type has its own peculiarity that distinguishes it from others, and different text-types should be dealt with respectively when translated. There is no universally applicable translation theory that is proper for all types of texts. Consequently, in translating drama which has its own uniqueness, a translator should adopt translation theories and principles that are the most relevant. The purpose of translating drama is to perform an original drama on certain foreign stage. The translation of drama, therefore, should take the target language audience's reception into serious consideration.Pragmatics is concerned with the study of meaning as communicated by a speaker (or writer) and interpreted by a listener (or reader). The pragmatic analysis of translation is an approach to comprehensively analyzing certain rendered version concerning language use by means of pragmatic theories. Dialogues in drama are communicative, so pragmatic analysis is inter-related with drama translation. The present paper includes three parts.The first part is an introduction, including two chapters.Chapter one provides a detailed introduction to the development of translation studies and pragmatic studies, indicating that the application of pragmatics to translation will shed new light on translation studies. Chapter two is a tentative study on drama and the development of drama translation. At the end of the chapter, the author concludes that a good translation of drama should concern pragmatic elements.The second part constitutes the main body of this thesis. It provides a comprehensive pragmatic analysis of drama translation. By giving proper vivid examples, the author introduces some pragmatic theories including deixis, conversational implicature, relevance theory, context theory and politeness principle. This part is composed of five chapters, and each chapter is a study on one theory. All examples are originated from some famous playtexts, such as Teahouse, Thunderstorm, etc.A conclusion is provided in the third part. The author restates that a translator should notice both the pragmatic equivalence and semantic equivalence in translating drama. The application of pragmatics explores a new and promising vista for drama translation studies.