Functional Theory Approach To Polarity And Duality In Drama Translation

As a special literary genre, drama not only provides the play text and also serves as the blue print of the theatre. This specific stage property endows drama with something more than a mere literary and linguistic matter, which further complicates the translating of play text across languages, cultures, and theatrical traditions. Therefore, to study the translation process of this specific genre and to formulate applicable theories for drama translation requires its unique perspective. Drama translation study has been an argument for long in the history from 1930s to today, and it is still there as polarities without a middle road. At one end, the well-known translation theorist Susan Bassnet favors "readability" of drama, while at the other end, Patrick Pavis insists on "performability".This paper would tentatively make the discussion of the polarities issue from the perspective of functionalist theory. The paper gives a detailed review of the argument to depict the polarities in drama translation study. With the functionalist theory as the framework, taking the polarities as the focus, the author provides the analysis of both "readability" and "performabilty" of drama. With the stand that: any translation is an act of purpose, the author tries to convince that "performablity" should be favored while we take highly of the "readability". Drama has a distinguished purpose of stage and the stage performability cannot be diminished. This paper would take the "readability" and "performability" equally important. For the success of readability, this author makes an exploration of the cultural context analysis to get the "readability" at best, and the same time, the author studies the peculiarity of the drama to demonstrate how to "put the page to stage". This way, the author in this paper would reinforce duality of the drama translation, so as to wind up the argument between this two ends. Finally, the author works on the translation of Lao She's Teahouse by Ying Ruocheng and by John Howard, to convince people of the success of the duality of drama translation in Ying Ruocheng's version. With the exemplification in these two versions, the author proved her point: it is important and possible to have both in the strategies of drama translation. This paper is a tentative trying to make an exploration to the long-existing polarities in drama translation, and based on the functionalist theory this paper advocates to accept the "performability" and "readability" equally, so we take the two as the duality of the strategies of drama translation.