| Although drama translation is an important branch of literary translation, it has received inadequate attention in the genre-focused translation study which centers on the specific problem of translating poetry. Most previous researches on drama translation are usually attempts to compare a target text with the source text in terms of the reproduction of certain dramatic language features or to propose drama translation principles and criteria. But this paper, different from previous studies, is mainly concerned with the relevance of treatments of presuppositions to drama translation.In the present study, presupposition is approached from both semantic and pragmatic perspectives. It is argued that in translating dramatic texts, translators may fail to understand part of the dramatic dialogues, meanings of words, or have difficulty with presupposition triggers. Misunderstanding may also be related to the specific context or culture in which the utterance takes place. Therefore, linguistically, the 13 presupposition triggers as illustrated by Levinson may help translators have a better understanding of the ST. On the contextual level, when a character adopts some presuppositions, ambiguity may crop up, so the translator should determine the meaning of expression with the right context. From the perspective of culture, what is presupposed in the SL may be partially shared or not shared at all by the TL readership, which often turns out to be problems for the translator.The study of presupposition is significant in drama translation in which translators have to carefully treat different presuppositions so as to make the TT meaningful. A case study of two English versions of Lao She's Cha Guan by Ying Ruocheng and John Howard-Gibbon further verifies that treatments of presuppositions are of great relevance to drama translation. |
