Turn-Taking And Dramatic Dialogue Translation

Drama is one of the most ancient art forms in literary history.Its primitive form is stage performance.And then drama gradually develops into a literary genre.This “inborn” duality namely performability and literariness,generates a controversial argument over the nature of drama among scholars for a long time.Therefore,the study of drama translation is also trapped in the “labyrinth”.As Susan Bassnett puts it,“dramatic translation is an unsolved but neglected area of translation research.” The birth and development of drama stylistics has brought due attention to performability.And it has also provided a new perspective and theoretical framework for the study of drama dialogue and its translation.As a central concept in stylistics of drama,turn-taking is an important mechanism to control the turn distribution,flow of discourse and smooth communication between participants in their conversation.Sacks and his co-researchers divided the turn-taking system into two aspects: the turn-constructional component and the turn-allocation component.The turn-construction controls the turn-length and its organizational characteristics.The turn-allocation is the distribution of the say,a conversion of one turn to another.The discourse markers and the transition relevance place(TRP)are also vital factors in turn-taking system.The main text of drama language is dialogue,and the mode of drama dialogue is the turn-taking system.In the study of drama dialogue,the turn-taking system provides us a new theoretical and methodological basis.In China,however,there are only some drama studies which is under the guidance of turn-taking theory.Papers applying turn-taking system to explain the performability of drama translation is quite limited.Turn-taking theory plays a strong explanatory role in the process of dramatic dialogue translation.The thesis analyzes systematically the two versions of “Long Day's Journey into Night” from the aspects of turn-construction and turn-allocation.The contrastive analysis of the two versions: Zhang Tingchen's version and the version of Wang Zhaohui and Liang Jingzhu,indicates Zhang's version is more suitable for stage performance because of its flexible use of turn-taking strategy.This also reveals that translators must take the features of drama dialogue into account when being engaged in drama translation.It is of great importance to integrate the relevant theoretical knowledge of turn-taking into the whole process of drama translation in order to make the translation more readable and playable.