Performability In Drama Translation

Death of a Salesman,a masterpiece of Arthur Miller,has long been regarded as a treasure of the theater circle.With Ying Ruocheng’s translation,along with effort of Miller and other personnel of Beijing People?s Art Theatre,the play was onto the stage in 1983 and received huge welcome of Chinese audience.At that time there were already several translated versions available in China,but Ying Ruocheng insisted re-translating it considering the stage effect.This article focuses on the performance of drama translation,and analyzes the translation of Death of a Salesman based on the performability principle.Drama is an ancient art category,and drama translation activities also have long history.However,for a long time,drama translation lacks systematic research and many concepts in the research are controversial.Drama possesses a dual identity: both a literary genre and a kind of stage art forms.The complexity of its own identity leads to the relatively scarce advance in drama translation research.The consideration of the stage performance lays the drama translators some troubles in translation and thus makes it more difficult.There are no real-time explanations of the stage performance which poses difficulties on the drama translation.In 1970 s,Susan Bassnette put forward the performability principle,opening a new door to drama translation research.Many scholars are committed to the study of performability principle.Although it later received huge controversy,performability principle is still an effective and worthy method to deal with drama translation.From the perspective of performability principle,combining with the characteristics of drama texts,this article will compare two translations of Arthur Miller’s masterpiece Death of a Salesman,trying to explore the possible translation methods in performance-oriented drama translation.The thesis aims to make some contribution to drama translation research and provide references for the following studies.