A Study On Performability In Drama Translation Of The Glass Menagerie From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the growth of the living standard,more and more people choose to see drama in theaters in weekends.In order to diversify domestic drama and satisfy the needs of audiences with different ages,on the one hand,directors continuously create new drama;on the other hand,translators or drama researchers introduce some good foreign dramas or revise them partly.Within the latter,translation plays a great role as a bridge.However,drama translation is always a large and difficult study topic.The reason is that different from other literary work,drama has duality: readability and performability.Drama translation theorists also have different opinions on which one should be given the highest priority.This paper takes Tennessee Williams' s The Glass Menagerie as a case study and skopos theory put forward by Vermeer in 1978 as the theoretical basis.And performability of drama translation will be discussed,and some problems which should be paid attentions to during drama translation will be also summarized.Firstly,according to the ages and purposes of translation,and the fields which translators specialize,the author chooses two relatively representative Chinese versions from five versions of The Glass Menagerie to do comparative analysis,respectively the translator Lu Jin and directress from Taiwan Ma Tingni.Then,by combining Vermeer's three rules(skopos rule,coherence rule and fidelity rule)with language features of drama(economy principle,action,localization,personality and figure of speech),the author makes a profound analysis of the perfomablity of these two versions.The methods of comparative analysis and case analysis are adopted in the course of comparing translations.By comparing and analyzing,the author finds that Lu's version adopts literal translation in most parts and meanwhile keeps the structure and meaning of original sentences well with some annotations.Ma Tingni uses free translation in order to make languages more colloquial and close to life,which presents the language features of drama on the stage better.However,one disadvantage of Ma's version is that some proper namesare not translated accurately.On a whole,Ma's version suits performing better.Besides analyzing the performability of two translations,the author also summarizes some aspects which should be paid attentions to during drama translation.Firstly,based on skopos rule,translation should try to keep concise and decrease the use of ambiguous words or sentences and multiple negatives words;at the same time,the action of language should be paid attention to,especially the translation of verbs which should present the integrity and consistency of stage performance,and highlight character's personality.Then,according to coherence rule,the translation of proper noun or figure of speech need to be taken extra caution to ensure that audiences can grasp the development of drama plots in time.Finally,in terms of fidelity rule,every detail should not be omitted during drama translation,for instance,the description of character's personality and the layout of stage.