A Research Of Choices Of Drama Translation Strategies From The Perspective Of Genre's Social Purpose

With regard to drama translation, much attention has long been paid to its dualistic property,"readability"and"performability". They are also the criteria for the evaluation of drama translation. However, it seems that theoreticians have not traced back to the issue of genre. According to Martin (2004/2006:505), genre is a staged, goal-oriented social process. Hence, drama is social-purpose-oriented, and the evaluation of drama translation should be discussed from the perspective of genre's social purpose. The present research focuses on how translators make choices of translation strategies to achieve equivalence of social purpose by taking the two translated versions of The Vagina Monologue as data.The social purpose of drama is to entertain audience. Hence audience plays an important role in realizing it, and the choice of translation strategies should first of all focus on the target audience's reception. That requires translators to make choices of data by employing the translation strategy of radical cuts and addition. However, different translators make different choices of data. We will analyze how the two translators make choices of data in order to achieve the equivalence of drama's social purpose.Genre is downward realized on the stratum of register, which is composed of three parameters: Field, Tenor and Mode, each tied to a strand of metafunctional meaning. Field is tied to the Ideational metafunction, realized in transitivity system on the lexicogrammatical level; Tenor is tied to the Interpersonal metafunction, which is realized in Mood, Modality and Appraisal system; Mode is closely related to the Textual metafunction, which is embodied in the Theme system. Therefore, translation equivalence can be sought on the Field, Tenor and Mode, namely, the Ideational equivalence, the Interpersonal equivalence and the Textual equivalence. The strategies by which equivalence can be achieved on the lexicogrammatical level are usually literal translation; the strategy by which the equivalence is sought above the lexicogrammatical level tends to be free translation. The translators need to make choices between the two extremes of literal translation and free translation in order to achieve the equivalence of social purpose.Within the theoretical framework of SFG, the thesis conducts a detailed analysis of the two translated versions of The Vagina Monologue and comes tentatively to the following conclusions. For the translation of drama concerning sensitive topics, the translator first needs to focus on the first order Tenor for the choice of appropriate parts in ST. Then, the translator needs to go bottom up from the lexicogrammatical level all the way to the genre level to seek equivalence on the different levels with an ultimate aim of equivalence on the genre level.Our research findings show that the equivalence of social purpose can be achieved by preserving or altering the original transitivity processes, preserving the original modality patterns and Attitude evaluation and preserving or altering the original patterns of thematic progression. For the drama translation proper, equivalence on the Interpersonal realm plays the most important role in achieving the ultimate equivalence of drama's social purpose.