Relevance Theory And Drama Translation

Due to its dualistic nature(as drama can be both treated as part of the literary system and part of the theatrical system),drama has remained, as Susan Bassnett has put it:"Over the years I have revised my views several times,though I still find the image of the labyrinth is an apt one for this most problematic and neglected area of translation studies research.Less has been written on the problems of translating theatre texts than translating any other text type."(Susan Bassnett,2001:90) Even though very few monographs can be found regarding drama translation,many translators,such as Zhu Shenghao,Yu Guangzhong and Ying Ruocheng,have summarized their drama translation strategies and principles from their first-hand experience.And Western scholars,for instance,Susan Bassnett and Sirkku Aaltonen have made their contributions to a more comprehensive and in-depth understanding of drama translation,especially after taking the characteristics of stage-oriented drama into consideration.Relevance theory,first put forward by Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson in their co-authored book,Relevance:Communication and Cognition in 1986,is basically a pragmatic theory related to verbal communication.However,soon after it was proposed,it has exerted great influence on a variety of fields,such as linguistics,literature,psychology, and translation.Emst-August Gutt successfully introduced it into translation and elaborated it in his work Translation and Relevance: Cognition and Context.In this thesis,the author ventures to apply the theory of relevance into drama translation and set optimal relevance as a criterion in analyzing the translation strategies and principles adopted in the two Chinese versions,《巴巴娜少校》translated by Lin Haozhuang and《芭巴拉少校》translated by Ying Ruocheng.With the exemplification and analysis,the author intends to convince the reader of the success of Ying Ruocheng's translation,who has purposefully adapted his translation according to the requirement of on-stage performance.Though disputes regarding this theory remain fierce,we can hardly ignore the insights of relevance theory given to our understanding of translation.In this thesis,the author makes a tentative study on a comparative analysis of the two Chinese versions of Major Barbara from a relevance-theoretic perspective to help us better understand the appropriate translation strategies and principles we should adopt for performance-oriented drama translation.Besides,under the guidance of Relevance Theory and the drama translation strategies proposed by Ying Ruocheng,it has demonstrated the theoretical applicability of optimal relevance to drama translation by a comparative analysis of the examples chosen from the two Chinese versions of Major Barbara.