"Conveying The Meaning In Its Full Flavor"-On Wang Rongpei's Dramatic Translation Techniques

As a special literary form, drama is given the feature of performability. Drama language, especially its lyrics, has the characteristics of being personalized and colloquial and extremely rich in rhythm. Performability has long been the focus of studies on dramatic translation at home and abroad. As one of the four most famous Chinese ancient dramas, The Peony Pavilion is a truly rarity. The beautiful words, engaging anecdotes and vivid characters make it enduring and of great value in literature and culture. Scholars made efforts to translate it, and among many different versions of translation, Wang Rongpei's version balances "spirit" and "meaning", and creatively reproduces the charm of the original style. Domestic and foreign scholars have done lots of studies on The Peony Pavilion on the characters and their psychological features, images and symbols, kunqu opera music, cultural significance, edition and rewriting. There are also many scholars who have conducted comparative researches on different versions.Wang Rongpei in 1994 firstly proposed the criteria of conveying the meaning in its full flavor in Translation of Book of Songs. He believes that "expressiveness" means to convey the meaning of original text in words, rhetoric, culture, purpose, cognition, thought and interpretation. While "vivid" means that when translating, translators should take literary form, style, emotion, structure, rhyme, artistic conception and tone into consideration.Taking Wang's translation of "The Peony Pavilion" as the research object, this thesis aims to analyze lyrics translation in Wang Rongpei's The Peony Pavilion according to the criteria of "conveying the meaning in its full flavor" and focus on what is the meaning of "conveying the meaning" and "in its full flavor" respectively, what pre-translation activities he has done before translating and what techniques he uses during translating to meet his aim of "convey the meaning in its full flavor". The thesis aims to solve two problems as follows:First, how to apply the criteria of conveying the meaning in its full flavor to The Peony Pavilion; second, what is the significance of the criteria for Dramatic Translation from Chinese into English. Through research on lyrics translation in Wang Rongpei's The Peony Pavilion under the criteria of conveying the meaning in its full flavor, this article analyzes how the criteria effectively guide drama lyrics translation practice, thus it provides some theory basis and reference for dramatic translation practice and the conduction of translation theoretical system in the future.