A Case Study Of Ying Ruocheng’s English Translation Of Tea House In Light Of Conversational Implicature

Drama language is chiefly composed of dialogues that are also the main and core part of drama text. As a result, the comprehension of the dialogues plays an important role in the understanding of drama language. Dialogues are highly refined by the playwrights to define the characters’ personalities and achieve a good stage effect. Therefore, the dialogues are often designed to be full of implications, which are called the conversational implicatures in pragmatics. Tea House, as one of the best Chinese plays and Lao She’s classical works, is famous for its excellent dialogues. Lao She’s professional language skills are fully embodied in his flexible use of the popularized oral expressions. The dialogues he designed in Tea House not only vividly embody the characters’ personalities, reflect the social backgrounds and imply the theme of the story, but also strengthen the language effects of the conversational implicatures. However, these abundant conversational implicatures also undoubtedly increase the difficulty of translating. Ying Ruocheng, as a special translator who has multiple identities, accurately grasps the implied meanings in Tea House and successfully represents the conversational implicatures in his translation with his years of stage experiences and flexible translation skills, which make his translation enjoy a good reputation both at home and abroad.Grice believes that in the process of language communication both sides of the communication must abide by some principles in order to achieve the success of communication so that the communication can go on in a simple, direct and efficient way. These principles are called the maxims of Cooperative Principle. But in real communication, people often deliberately violate one or more maxims to obtain special conversational implicatures. Translation is a special kind of communicative activities. And drama translation enjoys more particularity as one of the translation activity. In recent years, though the translation researchers and scholars have focused on and studied the drama translation in some sense, most of the drama translation studies concentrate on the perspective of linguistic approach rather than the pragmatic translation approach. Such single model of research brings great limitations to the development of drama translation.This thesis applies the theory of Conversational Implicature as the theoretical guide to the study of the English version of Tea House, and endeavors to find a joint point to connect the pragmatics and drama translation by analyzing the dialogues that flout the Cooperative Principle, from which to probe into the applicability of the Conversational Implicature to the drama translation and further explore how should the translator reproduce the conversational implicature of the original text to achieve the pragmatic equivalence. The author chooses some typical dialogues in Tea House that flout the Cooperative Principle as the case to study and discuss that the Conversational Implicature has a good guiding effect on the drama translation through the analysis of Ying Ruocheng’s accurate understanding of the original conversational implicature in Tea House. At the meanwhile the author gets the revelation from Ying’s successful translation that it is important for the original conversational implicature’s reproduction to select translation strategies and methods according to the original conversational implicature.This thesis is divided into five chapters. The first chapter is the general introduction to the purpose of the research and structure of the thesis. The second chapter is a literature review that mainly aims at providing a research background to the theoretical development in chapter three through the summary of the research of the drama translation, Tea House and its English versions, Ying Ruocheng and his translation theory. The third chapter establishes a theoretical framework for this thesis. In it, the author emphasizes the theory of Conversational Implicature and its features and analyzes the appliance of the theory in drama translation. In the fourth chapter, the main body of the thesis, the author discovers, through the case study of the flouting four maxims and mixed maxims and the discussion of Ying’s flexible translation of the dialogues in Tea House, that the theory of Conversational Implicature has a guiding effect on the drama translation through. The fifth chapter is the conclusion that tells the research findings and limitations. And the author also hopes to provide some reference for the future drama translation research and practice.