Translation Strategies For Peking Opera From The Perspective Of Performability

Peking Opera is the quintessence of Chinese nation. It is vivid in expression, rich in content, and epitomizes the core values of traditional Chinese thought and art. In the 1930s, Peking Opera artist Mei Lanfang sailed to the United States with China's most representative art form. Since then, presenting Peking Opera to the world and spreading Chinese culture overseas have been the shared wishes of generations of Jingju artists and translators.Translating Peking Opera, however, is a rather challenging task. As a branch of drama, Peking Opera is featured by its dualistic nature:literariness and performability. That is, it can either be viewed as a literature or be transformed into a performance. Hence, translators are confronted with a difficult choice:to concentrate on the literature aspect, or to serve the function of performance? Till today, scholars in drama translation studies are still trapped in the labyrinth, and debates concerning performability and literariness have never ceased. Fortunately, many researchers begin to realize that it would be more productive to observe what translators, directors and performers do to the texts as well as to look at the criteria that make the texts performable.This thesis takes as the object of study the English Peking Opera The Phoenix Returns to Its Nest translated and directed by Elizabeth Wichmann, attempting to analyse the strategies for performance-oriented Jingju translation. In order to address this problem, this thesis adopts a qualitative methodology and explores the translation practice of The Phoenix Returns to Its Nest in a systematic manner through approaches such as case study and interview.It is found out in this research that the performability of the Jingju script can be discussed from textual, theatrical and ideological aspects. The English translation of The Phoenix Returns to Its Nest has effectively reproduced the brevity and sound effects of the original language. Taking free translation as her major translation strategy, the translator takes into consideration the audience acceptance in the target culture while at the same time preserves the original flavour of Jingju art form. Nevertheless, the performability of the translated script should not be viewed as a simple reflection of the translator's subjectivity but the result of collaboration between translator, director, actor and other agents.In the translation studies, the application of performability is still in its early stage, and case studies centring around the translation of Peking Opera are even fewer. It's hoped that this thesis could provide a new perspective for theories of Jingju translation and cast light on its future practice.