Functionalist Approaches And Drama Translation

Drama, an important art form and an effective means for cultural exchanges, is enjoyed by more and more people with the acceleration of globalization in recent years. Though a great many dramatic works have been translated in and off China, we can observe that the study of drama translation is among one of the most neglected areas. This is mainly due to the peculiarity of the dramatic text, which can be not only regarded as a literary form to be read and studied by the reading public but also as the blueprint for stage performance with the theatre audience as its ultimate receptors. Under the grand context of cultural communication, culture-specificity of the dramatic texts poses another difficulty for drama translators. Up to now, seldom is any theoretical framework adopted to solve the conflict between readability, perfomability and cultural transmission in drama translation.Among modern translation theories, functionalist approaches, which break away with the traditional equivalence-based and form-focused linguistic translation theories, provide a new perspective for translation practice and evaluation. Skopos is considered as the primary determinant of translation process and adequacy as the criterion for translation criticism.This thesis, based on functionalist approaches, endeavors to conduct a case study of two English versions of Lao She's Teahouse. The author aims to explore the validity of functionalist approaches in drama translation and to demonstrate the significance of functionalist approaches to drama translation practice and evaluation. The thesis is divided into five chapters. Chapter One gives a general introduction to the research background, the theories to be adopted and the research question to be solved in the whole thesis. Chapter Two is devoted to the introduction of drama and drama translation, including a detailed literature review of the study of drama translation. Chapter Three offers theoretical framework for the thesis by briefing functionalist approaches. A comparative case analysis of the two English versions of Lao She's Teahouse is offered in the fourth chapter. The significance of functionalist approaches to drama translation is summed up in the last chapter.