Ying Ruocheng’s Translation Of Teahouse:a Study From The Perspective Of Cultural Ecology Of Drama

Cultural ecology is a new interdisciplinary subject that applies the methodology of ecology and systemic mind into culture which studies the relation between the generation and development of culture as well as its developing environment(the environment of nature, society and culture).As regards cultural ecology, the pioneer works can be traced back to Julian Steward, student of Kroeber, who explained the basic idea of cultural ecology, which was regarded as the beginning of cultural ecology and who held that it is inseparable between culture and the environment we live by, which interact with each other or interact as causes and effects of each other, and that the concept of environmental adaptation forms the basis of cultural ecology.Cultural ecology of drama, according to Dong Jian(1993), is a complex, synthetically open system, and it possesses two inter-relevant aspects: the external ecology of drama refers to the whole society’s culture circle the balanced and coordinating relationships between drama arts and the rest in culture, for example, drama and economy, drama and policy, drama and education and other ideological fields like philosophy, religion and ethics, to name just a few; He further proclaimed that the internal ecology of drama refers to the coordinating relation of director,acting, dance, arts of stage, music and light during the production of a drama.This paper, first introduces respectively the definitions of both internal and external cultural ecology of drama, and then probes into cultural ecology on Teahouse. The author of this study,analyzes the elements of cultural ecology in drama from Ying Ruocheng’s version. Based on the analyses mentioned above, the author establishes a translating model, an ordered binary group.According to the proposed translating model, Mr. Ying Ruocheng’s version has not been a traditional one which has only the content of the original text, that is, a “one-dimension” text, but a “three-dimension” one with a collection of factors both from internal and external cultural ecology of drama, which is a “four-dimension” text. On the axis of time, the version makes it feasible by making the foreign readers fly back to the periods from late Qing Dynasty to the anti-Japanese war. That is, by taking advantage of the elements of external cultural ecology of drama, Ying Ruocheng makes the readers go through the time tunnel, backward to the scenes of the then-society. What shows on stage is a good reflection of what happened during the very period the external layer brings us. The individuals, the common people in that times, are also known to the audience.In summary, in the “four-dimension” version, it is the external cultural ecology of drama that makes the readers correspond to the time axis; likewise, it is the internal cultural ecology of drama that is responsible for introducing the scenes of character portrayal. Obviously, the twoaspects of cultural ecology of drama interact with each other, co-determine the qualified target text.This is a creative study of interpreting the play Teahouse from the perspective of cultural ecology of drama. On one hand, it is an interdisciplinary study to combine cultural ecology and drama together in order to do research in translation; on the other hand, the author establishes a translating model in which the assignment operation of the User Defined Function represents vividly the factors of cultural ecology of drama in Ying Ruocheng’s English version. What is more, it is a heuristic study for the translator to translate other drama works. Hopefully, this thesis can pave way to more fundamental works. The author will be happy to see the coming scholars and translators produce more good works of applying the essence of cultural ecology in drama.