Drama Translation On Cultural Horizons

As one of the traditional art forms, drama has already become an essential part in the literature field. Different from other literary genres, such as novels and poetry, drama boasts its own features prominently.Translation makes it possible that all of the cultural treasures in the world can be shared, by which a lot of exchanges have already been made. On one hand, classic works written by foreign authors gets the opportunity to be laid on our bookshelves. On the other hand, the essence of Chinese literature is also appreciated internationally. Hence great attention should be paid to the translation of drama, for the lack of concern has existed for some time.Drama is considered to be a comprehensive art form which is highly condensed of culturally-loaded information. This thesis tries to probe into the strategy of drama translation on the cultural horizons on the basis of two translation versions of Teahouse, which are respectively translated by Ying Ruocheng from China and John Howard-Gibbon from Canada. Altogether there are four chapters in this thesis. Chapter one introduces the five contemporary translation schools and offers a general review of translation studies. Chapter two stresses the unique characteristics of drama language and hereby unveils the criteria of drama translation. According to Peter Newmark's categorization of culture, in the third chapter the author makes a comparative study of the two translation versions, mainly in view of the translation of cultural information. Then in chapter four the requirements and the specific methods for drama translation are provided. Finally the conclusion is reached that culture plays an important role in drama, so cultural equivalence should be focused in drama translation.All these discussions are supported by quotations from Teahouse and the two...