Relevance-Theoretic Approach To Drama Translation

As the founder of American modern drama,Eugene O'Neill has been widely acclaimed as a great playwright for his accomplishments.Long Day's Journey Into Night is his final drama which went public after his death.The show became virus across the country after its premiere,and was considered by many critics to be one of the most outstanding works of O'Neill.This four-act autobiographical drama begins with a superficial peaceful morning,but ends with a depressing night.In the playtext,allusion,idioms and contextual implication are used with high frequency to express emotions which is noticeable between lines.Drama has been considered as a special type of literature which boasts the characteristics of both literariness and artistry in language.The existence of stage direction is the evidence that the drama is bound to be performed on the stage from the first word.Limitation of time and space on stage and the lack of annotation put forward specific requirements of “performability” and “speakability” of dramatic language.The complex characteristics of drama itself set up obstacles for drama translation.Due to the different cognitive environment,how to make the audience get the contextual effect similar to that of the original audience in the case of asymmetric cognitive information stored in the brain has become an inevitable problem for translators.Relevance theory was proposed by Sperber & Wilson and introduced into translation by Gutt,who believed that human communication is a kind of “ostensive-inferential” communication.Translation is also a kind of communication.From the perspective of relevance theory,drama translation should take the cognitive environment of the audience into consideration,which requires the translator to make assumptions over the cognitive environment of the audience,so that the audience can obtain adequate contextual effects with minimal efforts,i.e.translators need to make sure that their translation resembles the original text while ensuring the natural flow of the language.After intensive reading,it can be found that literary allusions,idioms and contextual implication that appear most frequently in the playtext represent different cognitive environment of audience speaking different language.In order to ensure the effectiveness of the translation,this paper selects two Chineseversions from professional translator-namely Wang Yiqun and Qiao Zhigao,and finds that there are differences between them.Therefore,based on relevance theory,this paper makes a comparison between the two versions,analyzes the relevance among the translation and target audiences so as original playtext and makes reasonable account for the degree of resemblance according to the relevance principle,in an expectation of providing a new perspective for drama translation.