The Misinterpretation Of Rewriting In Drama Translation

Tennessee Williams is one of the three famous playwrights in the period from 1940 s to the 1980 s. His contribution is not only from the large amount of creation on twenty-five full length plays such as The Glass Menagerie, A Streetcar Named Desire, and Cat on the Hot Tin Roof and so on, numerous short plays, five volumes of essays, and poems, but also from the great topics he puts in the drama. Counting from the first day when A Streetcar Named Desire successfully came to its full stop, this car ran fifty years, and Tennessee Williams, together with this play endured nearly half century by the different media recreation, stage or film. He is considered by most critics as the greatest playwright of America after the Second World War.A Streetcar Named Desire,as some critics words, is a drama for Psycho-drama, and is also a work holding the theme in Williams’ —abettor, which, among other works, is considered far away from the moral reproach theme by Henrik Ibsen and George Bernard Shaw, but just because of these hush works, it makes Tennessee a impression of rebellion. Love, departure, panic, heterosexuality, homosexuality, alienation, absent, startle change between past and nowadays, and all the heart breaking story can be found in his plays. After reading Streetcar, it has to say that if the playwright does not have the deep thinking of the life about himself and all the surrounding happened in youth and society, he cannot create a work survived a long time.Marginal subject or centralized topic, Tennessee is hard to be interpreted. His work like A Streetcar Named Desire is so notorious that it was shut out of the door of central culture of America at that time. And probably because of this, there are so little written about Williams.This paper therefore mainly roots on the example of the world-wide known drama A Streetcar Named Desire, and researches the misinterpretation of rewriting of drama translation with the assistance of literature’s analysis;Susan Bassnett argues that the drama translation should go back to the literature empire, which has its innate motive. No matter what kind of style a man put the play on stage or screen, it needs firstly literature research. Therefore, before the citation of theories in translation, it should know well the literature aspects of drama, such as the definition of drama, characters, plot, action, conflict, tragedy, comedy and the relationship between drama and reader and so on.Then, a translator should be clear about the drama inner structure: the function of stage instructor, the dialogue and also how the dramatist arranges the division of a drama.All this preparation in the dimension on literature paves the way for the comparison of three target texts by different translators. The word selection, the control of daily speaking, the rhythm of dialogue, and the vivid, cubism and wholesome character should be reflected as what the playwright wants to tell the reader through translation. There is a confusion and contradiction if a translation should approach the target culture, the translator should rewrite to fit in the context of the readers in different countries, but it sounds queered that the rewriting has no bottom-line to control it.It seems that a play by playwright should find its meaning and terminal destiny on stage. Actually when the readers know the creating life by Williams, they may find that many of his works last only two or three months, and some are limited to be performed. After research, the reality is that not all the dramas written all over the world can be put into playing.It seems that the rewriting on stage or screen has no standard to control the translators t reflect the decree of the playwright, so the study of this paper needs to solve three problems:1.Why does a drama need rewriting? And does this change what the author has said?2.What is the orientation of drama, literature or stage?3.How does the literature analysis of drama influence the drama translation?This paper includes five chapters: chapter one is the introduction, which focuses on the researching background and the reason to study this thesis; chapter two is the literature review part. Because this researching paper discuses the literatures function on drama translation, the first two section gives the information about Tennessee and his plays, then it leads to nowadays’ situation on drama translation. Chapter three is about the theory discussion and chapter four is the analysis on misinterpretation of rewriting with the help of three versions. Chapter five is the conclusion part.This paper uses the comparison and text analysis approach to find the logical and psychological reason causing the misinterpretation: if the translator does not pay attention to the literature understanding about the story background and the deeper feeling of the characters( the poetics or universe of discourse in Lefevere’ s words), the rewriting would cause the misinterpretation.Although rewriting in translation is commonsense to disobey the Source Text, sometimes it causes the misinterpretation. To narrow down the source text for comparison, the researcher choose A Streetcar Named Desire and three translated texts for study, in order to find the inappropriate translation which would cause the misinterpretation in readers when they get the translated texts.