A Comparative Study Of The Two English Versions Of Teahouse From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation Theory

Drama has been a long standing in the human's developmental history. As one of the main members of theatre plays, drama has played an important role which can not be ignored. However, the academic community has paid a little attention to the drama translation for a long time. The main reason is that drama is not only an important branch of literature, but also a kind of performing art. In other words, a drama should both be readable and performable. It is the duality that brings drama translation its unique features. In fact, a drama can fully present its value only by the performance in which the drama actors perform the script on the stage and deliver its information adequately and authentically to the audience, and at the same time communicate with the audience at a larger degree to make the audience resonate with them. Therefore, it can be said that the creation of a drama is firstly for stage, and secondly for page. The issues about how to carry out the drama translation and how to make the translating version more performable on the stage are very thoughtful and discussing.The drama Teahouse, as the monumental work of Laoshe on the language art, has been well-known for years in the circle of play and it is considered as a good play in which "one line depicts one character".(Ying Ruocheng,1999:6) It is the milestone of Chinese dramas not only from the language characteristics but also from its artistic achievement. Its full-bodied Beijing dialect, characterization, brevity, humourous dialogues and rich cultural connotation make the translated script fluent, expressive, brief, simple and easy to perform as well. The most important thing is that the translator should bear the audience's reaction in mind at all time and try his or her utmost to make the script easy to communicate with the audience in the process of translating. All of these factors make the drama play Teahouse full of challenges in translation.Peter Newmark is a well-known translation theorist and educator from England. His communicative translation theory emphasizes the acceptor's understanding and response, namely the effect of information delivering. The communicative translation theory permits the translator to reorganize the sentence structure, and the translator has much freedom to elaborate the original text, readjust the style, eliminate the ambiguity and even to amend the original's mistakes as to make the translation authentic and fluent. Thus, the translation can communicate well with the acceptors at a largest degree. This theory has provided a wide space for translators to render the drama. Based on the communicative translation theory, this thesis compares the two English versions of Teahouse translated by Ying Ruocheng or Howard-Gibbon with the purpose of finding how the two translators use different translation strategies to achieve the largest degree of communication with its target audience, and then evaluates which version is more communicative and performable and much easily understood and accepted by the target audience and finally can arouse the same resonance.