Application Of The Interpretive Theory To Dramatic Dialogue Translation

Drama is an art performed by actors in the theatre. Combined with literature, director, performance, music, dance and painting, drama entertains and enlightens people through the interaction between audience and actors on the stage. The history of drama can be traced back to religious ritual held by the ancient who pray for good weather on which the success of crop depends. It happens long before the emergence of human writing characters. Britain is the land of drama. As a kind of literature genre, drama plays an important role in the history of English literature. Compared with Chinese drama that balances between similarity in form and in spirituality, the western drama prefers to realism and pursues in "imitating". Common men living in our lives created by the realist have become the protagonists of drama since the period of Naturalism represented by Henrik Ibsen, a Norwegian playwright, and from then on, drama has built a more intimate relationship with the masses and common men.Different with fiction, poem and prose, drama is an art performable, in which dialogues are the main part of the playtext. Drama is deemed to be example of how to use words. Using words properly is an essential requirement for its success. Though taken from daily life, dramatic dialogues are very artistic instead of a repetition of people's actual dialogues and responsible for delineating character, advancing plot and theme representing. In naturalistic drama, lifelike dialogues become the main body of text. These simple and believable daily dialogues play an important role in revealing personality of characters and creating atmosphere of the drama. Hence here lies the author's original intention and artistic skill.How to reproduce the true-to-life spoken language in another language? How to ensure, therefore, the drama being accepted by the audience of the target language just as by those in the source language? Drama is characterized by the theatre entertaining and performance art. It is necessary for the audience coming into the theatre and sitting under the stage to communicate with the actors face to face. Dramatic translator should, on the one hand, provide dialogue versions which are capable of delicately delineating the character and accurately representing the theme. On the other hand, he/she should take the audience of the target language into consideration and choose popularized and easy spoken language to meet for the actor's performance requirement. Therefore, drama translation can be deemed as pursuing in, though the text it deals with is written, the effect similar to that demanded by interpreting.The purpose of this thesis is to apply the research achievements of the Interpretive Theory to explore how to translate dramatic dialogue well. Based on a large quantity of observations and analyses of successful translating practice, the interpretive model concentrates on persons involved in communication and defines the nature of translation as "a communicating behavior". The goal of translation, then, is to transmit the communicating meaning. It is just here that lies the reason for applying the interpretive theory to such a unique literary genre—drama translation. The cases employed in this thesis are quoted from Death of a Salesman, written by Arthur Miller, who is a loyal successor of naturalism, a school created by Ibsen. Death of a Salesman is regarded as the best drama since World War II and influences the people around the world for a long time. Leaving aside Shakespeare's classic, the author prefers sentences from it because of its true-to-life dialogues and the common men and women delineated with realism.The first chapter of this thesis will introduce briefly the origins and major types of drama as well as the perplexity in drama translation, paving the way for the emergence of the Interpretive Theory in the next chapter. The second chapter will preliminarily illustrate the major principle tenets and theory terms of the interpretive model. The reason for applying this theory to drama translation is also listed in this chapter. Supported by several examples, the necessity of cognitive and affective inputs, which is one of the major principles of the interpretive model, will be discussed in ChapterIII. The interpretive theory insists on "setting up equivalence" instead of correspondence between the source language (SL) and the target language (TL). ChapterIV will be devoted to demonstrate that deverbalization is essential in dramatic dialogue translation for the sake of reaching an equal communicating effect between the original and the version, i.e. the response from readers of the version is same with that from the original. Considering the deep influence of "dynamic equivalence" theory put forward by Eugene Nida, a brief comparison between "dynamic equivalence" and "setting up equivalence" will be made here. To reach a desired auditory effect, the implied meaning of intonation and rhythm in dramatic dialogue should not be neglected either. Chapter V will present, based on how to translate the interjection word "well" into Chinese, further analysis on another major principle proposed by the interpretive theory: in translation it is the explicit/implicit combination of meaning that should be taken into account. Chapter VI, the last chapter of this thesis, will tell us the higher demand laid by the complex reader group of drama, which in turn enhances the translator's active role in grasping the sense of the original text and re-expressing what he/she has understood like the author in writing to reach the goal of the interpretive theory—"similarity in spiritual instead of in form"At present, there is relatively less attention thrown upon drama translation. The author tentatively applies the research achievements of the interpretive theory to properly reproducing the dramatic dialogue in the hope of benefiting drama translators as well as propelling the mutual-combination of the interpretive theory and translating practice.