A Study Of Ying Ruocheng's Translation Of Death Of A Salesman: A Function-plus-Loyalty Approach

As an artistic form full of creativity and flexibility, drama is popular among different social classes throughout history, but studies on drama translation have been lacking of adequate and theoretical guidance for a long time. Due to cultural differences, the translation and introduction of Western dramas have not yet been fully and well developed.As a result, western dramas are hardly known to Chinese audiences and readers.With Skopos rule as the most important principle, function-plus-loyalty approach provides an appropriate theoretical basis for the translation and study of drama texts. As the masterpiece of Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman has been regarded by the critics as the greatest tragedy of the United States and it won Pulitzer Prize in 1949. Many Chinese translators have also been attracted by the charm of Death of a Salesman, and many translation versions have come out, among which Ying Ruocheng's version is commonly accepted as the most successful one. In order to explore the applicability of function-plus-loyalty in drama translation studies, this thesis tries to analyze Ying's version of Death of a Salesman from the perspective of function-plus-loyalty model.This thesis is composed of six parts. In the beginning, the author briefly describes the research background, research purpose, research questions and research significance.The first chapter is literature review. The author reviews previous studies of the Chinese versions of Death of Salesman from manipulation perspective, relevance perspective, functional perspective and other perspectives. Based on previous studies, the author points out the weaknesses of previous research and emphasizes the significance of this research.The second chapter is the theoretical framework. After a brief review of German functionalist approaches, the author emphatically introduces function-plus-loyalty model as the theoretical framework of this thesis. The three function-related rules and loyalty principle are briefly and respectively discussed.Chapter three is text analysis. Under the theoretical framework, the author analyzes Ying's version of Death of Salesman from function-related rules and loyalty principle respectively.Based on Ying Ruocheng's translation, chapter four summarizes three principles of drama translation under the guidance of function-plus-loyalty model.The last part is conclusion. The significant findings and the implications of this study are illustrated. Meanwhile, the research limitations are also analyzed in this part. In this way, this thesis is hoped to provide references for the future research in Chinese versions of Death of a Salesman.