Representation Of Gestic Dialogue In Shakespeare's Drama In Its Chinese Translation

It has been claimed that "Dramatic language is a main tool for unfolding the plot, depicting the characters and highlighting the theme of the drama.The peculiarity of drama art from other literary genres is particularly embodied in the special features of its language i.e.it is gestic(or it has subtext),and it depicts the personality of characters and expresses the characters' emotions.Gestic language in drama can physicalize the psychology of the characters and translate it into action thus unfolding the plot."(Zhou Anhua 2005:150) Translating drama inevitably involves the process of deducing the gestic language from the source text and transplanting it into the target text.Dramatic language usually consists of dialogue,monologue and aside.This dissertation will mainly focus on the translation of gestic dialogue.Furthermore,the speaker,in order to spur the hearer to take action that serves his or her interest,may employ language that is of tempting,menacing,ridiculing,flattering or other nature, implicit or explicit,to try to lead the hearer into his premeditated conversation.This dissertation will employ the speech act theory to conduct a case study of the three translations of Shakespeare's play Measure for Measure and analyze the translation of gestic dialogue.According to Searle's indirect speech,"one illocutionary act is performed indirectly by way of performing another"(Searle 2001:31).This theory can help understand the nature of"gestic" feature hidden in the dialogue in the source text,i.e. apart from the literal meaning,the utterance means something else and means to do something else.So when the gestic dialogue is to be translated into the target text,the gestic feature has to be excavated and represented in the target text in an effective form to perform the gestic function.Due to drama's duel nature of being literary and performable,the translation evaluation criterion lingers between audience-oriented or reader-oriented.The criterion the translator picks determines his strategy in translating a drama.However, this is not the focus of this dissertation.All the discussion of this dissertation will be based on the assumption that printed and performed plays exist side by side and the studied text,Measure for Measure,is analyzed as a performable playtext.The three translators had different purposes in translating this play.Zhu Shenghao took "performability" of the translated play into consideration though his translation is a little too formal for a stage;Liang Shiqiu(1927:41) held the view that "Playtext does not necessarily have to be performable.Performance is not possible without playtext while playtext is still complete without being staged into performance." and therefore did not pay much attention to the "performability" or gestic feature of the language when translating the play.Ying Ruocheng,whose ultimate goal of translating Measure for Measure was to stage it into performance, thus giving full consideration to the representation of gestic dialogue in the translated Chinese version.Therefore,this dissertation will give special attention and meticulous analysis to the tactics employed by Ying Ruocheng,whose translation is performance-oriented,in translating the gestic dialogue to explore if the gestic feature deduced from the original text can also be deduced from the target text and how the gestic dialogue in English drama is represented in its Chinese translation.The study suggests that Ying Ruocheng employed tactics such as addition,omission,adaptation for cultural domestication,shift of sentence mood,rendering affirmative utterance ambiguous,rendering ambiguous utterance affirmative,interpreting metaphor and simile,inversion of sentence order,substituting noun phrase/statement with verb phrase and application of four-character phrases etc.to make the intention of the speaker more explicit and the illocutionary force strong enough to unfold the plot for the performance in the target culture.