A Study On Ying Ruocheng's Translation Of Death Of A Salesman From The Perspective Of Manipulation Theory

Drama translation is one of the most important branches in literary translation. Starting from the 1970s, the translation theorists home and abroad paid much attention to the study of drama translation. Some scholars have some research on this from the perspective of functionalist approach, reception theory, relevance theory and so on. This paper aims to study drama translation from the perspective of manipulation theory which is a famous theory in cultural translation studies."Cultural turn"provides a new point of view and method for the research of versatile translational phenomenon. Among which Andre Lefevere's manipulation theory is one of the most famous theories. According to this theory, translation is manipulated by three factors: ideology, poetics and patronage. Ideology is one of the most important principles which are influential to the choice of the source text, the translation strategies and other handling of the details. Poetics which is said to be what literature should be like is critical to the use of language in translation. Ideology and the dominant poetics relates closely to the translated literary works, the viewpoint of the translator and the translation strategy. However, patronage can be exerted throughout the translation process by persons, a political party, a religious body, a social class, a royal court, publishers and last but not least, the media, both newspapers and magazines and larger television corporations. They have various demands on the translators. If these demands are coincidental with the discipline of translation and the translator's own expectation, they will promote translation activities.This paper aims to study Ying Ruocheng's translation of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman from the perspective of manipulation theory. The paper tries to apply manipulation theory to drama translation study so as to see the power of manipulation theory in translation studies. Ying Ruocheng (1929-2003) as a famous actor, director and translator translated eight famous dramas home and abroad which are welcomed by eastern and western audience. He has put forward his own theoretical thoughts on drama translation: colloquialism, brevity, intelligibility, performability and individual of characters. His translation not only aims to be faithful to the original but also in accordance with the target audience's aesthetic habits. However, according to Andre Lefevere's manipulation theory, faithfulness is a relatively complicated concept because translation is a kind of rewriting and rewriting is a kind of manipulation. So long as translation exists, manipulation will exert its power. So this paper adopts Andre Lefevere's manipulation theory to explore if Ying Ruocheng's translation of Death of a Salesman was manipulated by ideology, poetics and patronage.The paper first introduces the research subject and research methods, the characteristic and current situation of drama translation, the main subject of manipulation theory and the three controlling factors. Then the paper combines Ying Ruocheng's translation activities, the translation principles and the activities of the patronage to explain and prove if manipulation exists in Ying's translation process by taking some examples from the target text. And the conclusion is that there is manipulation in Ying's translation of Death of a Salesman. Manipulation is a kind of strategy in translation; it would be more accurate and objective to take the extra-linguistic elements such as ideology, poetics and patronage into the study of drama translation so as to grasp the essence of translation.