The Contextual Adaptability In Drama Translation

Drama constitutes an important part of the world literature and art,and its translation between countries has been going on for many centuries.Yet only limited scholarly attention has been devoted to the translation of drama.The reason mainly lies in the duality of dramatic text:for it can either be viewed as literary works or as an indispensable component of the art form of drama. Dramatic text is the foundation of stage performance,through which its value can be achieved totally.On the contrary,if a dramatic text cannot be performed on the stage,it won't be a successful play.Abundant facts can prove that dramatic text is a particular literary genre,whose particularity primarily lies in its purposes for stage,and secondly for pages.The dual characteristics of dramatic text make drama translation distinct from other forms of literary translation.Drama translation should have its own characteristics and criteria."Teahouse is the great work which stands for the top achievement of Lao She in the art of language.It has already won the universal praise.In the circle of play,Teahouse is unanimously considered as a good play famous for 'One line depicts one role'."(英若诚,1999:6) The characteristics of the play are very conspicuous:Rich dialects with Beijing flavor,abundant cultural connotations and terse,humorous and individualized language.All of those make the play enjoy a high prestige both at home and abroad all these years.There is no doubt that the strength and appeal of the play lies in Lao She's masterful portrayal of the characters and their language with Beijing dialect and the Beijing culture manifested.Yet all these characteristics of the play pose a big challenge to the translators,and how to correctly and lively translate the features of language and culture is also a hard problem for the translators.This thesis chooses Adaptation Theory as theoretic frame.Adaptation Theory holds:The process of language use as a process of choice making.These choices can be situated at any level of linguistic form:phonetic/phonological, morphological,syntactic,lexical,and semantic.The angle of contextual correlates in Adaptation Theory is used as a tool to compare and analyze the two English versions.Contextual correlates of adaptability potentially include all the ingredients of the communicative context with which linguistic choices have to be interadaptable.To be specific,all the ingredients that are interadaptable include: language users(utterer and interpreter),mental world(such as personality, emotions,beliefs,desires or wishes,motivations or intentions of language users), social world(such as social settings,institutions and culture,etc.) and physical world(such as time,space,bodily postures,physical appearance,physical conditions and biological property,etc.)Two English versions are chosen from the famous drama performer Ying Ruocheng and a Canadian,John Howard-Gibbon who knows Chinese and Chinese culture very well,to do the comparisons.It uses Adaptation Theory to analyze the two versions,aiming at inspecting whether cultural adaptability is or is not achieved in the linguistics and cultural characteristics of Teahouse and evaluate which version is more suitable for the contextual adaptability.The thesis consists of six parts:the first part gives introduction to the original writer of Teahouse——Lao She,the literary proposition of Teahouse,and the previous study about the translation of Teahouse.The two English versions of Teahouse are also discussed in part one.The second part gives a survey of adaptation theory and discusses the peculiarity of dramatic text.By analyzing the feature of dramatic text,this thesis puts forward the purposes of drama translation: mainly for stage performance.Then the characteristics of drama translation are discussed.From part three to part five,the thesis sums up the language style of Teahouse into three categories:Beijing dialect;colloquialism;and cultural loaded words.In this three sections,the thesis uses Adaptation theory as a tool and from the perspective of contextual elements to compare the two English versions of Teahouse.The last part is the conclusion,in which the author makes a summary on drama translation and a brief comment on the two English versions on the perspective of Adaptation theory.