Translation Of Dramatic Dialogue Under The Guidance Of The Principle Of Performability

In the late 1970 s, Susan Bassnett, one of the representatives of Cultural School, brought the concept of performability into the study and evaluation of drama translation, pointing that performability is the primary principle for the drama translators to follow. Similarly, Ying Ruocheng, a famous domestic drama translator, who on the basis of his several decades’ experience of stage performance and drama translating practice proposed his views towards drama translation, which was concluded by Meng Weigen as “intelligibility, brevity, actability, characterization, and pursuing the overall stage effect during the translating process”. It’s obvious that Ying Ruocheng’s “overall stage effect” is a perfect echo to Susan Bassnett’s perfomalility in the internal structure of drama text. Based on the translating practice of Inheritors, this thesis explores the effective strategies to present the performability within the text, putting forward that the translation of dramatic dialogue under the guidance of the principle of performability can be achieved by effort of the four aspects, namely intelligibility, brevity, characterization, actability. The writer learns from the similarities between Ruocheng Ying’s and Susan Bassnett’s translation theory, coming up with the above idea, expecting to provide practical guidance to the translation of scenic texts.The source material is selected from the first act of Susan Glaspell’s four-act historical drama Inheritors. To attain the best performing effect of Inheritors, based on the features of Inheritors’ s dramatic dialogue, the writer adopts several translation skills to process the first draft of translation, namely flexible translation of modal particle, reversed translation method, disconnection-reorganization method, omission, literal translation, amplification, free translation and composite translation. The translation practice of Inheritors shows that the translation of dramatic dialogue under the guidance of the principle has rules to follow, and the performability of text’s internal structure can be achieved by the pursuit of intelligibility, brevity, characterization, actability of translation. This discovery pushes the translation of dramatic dialogue under the guidance of the principle of performability into a new level of highly maneuverability, expecting to provide some direction for the practice of drama translation in future.