On The Treatment Of Discourse Markers In E-C Drama Translation

The study of discourse markers was started in1970s, and still is a hot topic in the study of pragmatics both at home and abroad up till now. For decades, many scholars have carried out macro and micro researches on discourse markers from the different theoretical perspectives, and made great achievements. Although scholars have many disputes over their definition, range, classification and so on, they all hold that they are quite common in verbal communication. They do not contribute to the propositional contents of utterances, but they possess rich pragmatic functions and constrain the production and comprehension of utterances. The present paper is aimed to expand the study of discourse markers into the research on English-Chinese drama translation, in the hope of making some contributions to the improvement of the overall quality of English-Chinese drama translation.Ying Ruocheng (1999) has pointed out that drama is an art which mostly depends on spoken language to show its artistic effects among all genres of arts. It is certain that in the dialogues of the drama, there exist quantities of discourse markers, which have much influence on the effects of characters’utterances and readers’or audience’s comprehension, and therefore, the translator has to treat them with caution in fear of damaging the overall effect of the translation. For the theoretical explanation of discourse markers, the Relevance Theory is considered as the most powerful one by the majority of scholars, and it can also be used in guiding the practice of translation. Hence the present paper, based on the Relevance Theory, makes a qualitative and quantitive study of the two Chinese renditions of four frequently-employed discourse markers in Arthur Miller’s famous play, Death of a Salesman, which are translated by Chen Liangting and Ying Ruocheng respectively. The author first selects a good many examples of the renditions of discourse markers, which are all the typical representatives of different pragmatic functions of the four discourse markers, and from the perspective of the Relevance Theory, the author makes a comparative analysis of the two renditions. Then the author analyzes the translation methods adopted by the two translators by means of statistic data, and evaluates their merits and demerits. Finally, the author gives his viewpoints on the treatment of discourse markers in English-Chinese drama translation.The study shows that for a translator, the treatment of discourse markers in English-Chinese drama translation is a complicated issue involving many factors. When dealing with them, he must take into account not only the successful representation of the functions of the original texts but also the readability and performability of the translated version. As for choosing translation methods, he shouldn’t confine himself to the word-to-word method, but apply any suitable Chinese expressions or adopt the method of omission according to concrete situations.