A Study Of Ying Ruocheng’s Stage-Oriented English-Chinese Play Translation

Literary translation has been an important issue in translation studies. However, drama translation, a vital part of literary translation, has always been marginalized because of the duality of drama- combining “literariness” and “performability”. This special feature makes studies on drama translation dispute over which should be the ultimate criterion: literariness or performability. Through literature analysis, it can be found different eras that(drama) translators live in and various purposes they hold lead to their diverse selections of translation criteria. In the early phase of foreign drama translation, the aim was acquainting Chinese readers with the works. Therefore, translators stressed on transmitting information and highlighting its “literariness”. With the increasing number of available Chinese versions, translations began to be regarded not only as reading materials, but also something that could be put on stage. Accordingly, translators began to emphasize “performability”, and then adaptations and re-translations became fashionable. In recent years, studies on drama translation are constantly increasing and have largely dropped the old argument over the priority of “literariness” or “performability”; instead, scholars have begun to explore how to realize “performability” in translation from different angles so as to make the translated version easy for actors to perform and for audiences to comprehend and to achieve the stage effect in the end. However, a systematic system on translating stage-oriented drama has not yet emerged.Taking Ying Ruocheng’s stage-oriented English-Chinese drama translation as its subject, this thesis attempts to provide useful guidelines to stage-centered drama translation. Ying’s triple identity, as a director, actor and translator, makes his translation a typical representative of stage-oriented drama translation. Thanks to his special identity, Ying understands what kind of translation is suitable for stage performance. When translating, Ying tries to make his translation fit for performance by virtue of his practical experience. Referring to relevant materials, this paper generalizes Ying’s translation theory as colloquialism, individuality and actability and analyzes the specific translation strategies Ying deploys under the guidance of his theory through a case study of Major Barbara.