Analysis Of Difficulties And Strategies For Translating Drama Scripts

Drama is a special literary genre,featuring both dramatism and theatricality.As the textual basis for the theatre art,a drama script usually serves the ultimate purpose of stage performance.This thesis is a case study on the English translation of A Hakka Boy’s Dream,a Chinese drama script for stage performance,discussing the difficulties in translating the character lines from a linguistic and a cultural perspective.Specifically,the translating difficulties analyzed in this paper are: highly colloquial and personalized character lines,Hakka folk songs with unique artistic styles,and rich cultural elements contained in the source script.The thesis then proposes feasible translation strategies from the perspective of performability.At the linguistic level,the proposed strategy is to use colloquial expressions in the translation and focus on the semantic meaning of characters’ lines while delivering appropriate tone and attitude in the specific context.At the cultural level,it is proposed to preserve the rhyme and rhythm of the original texts and highlight the image of the folk songs;making the semantic meaning explicit and adopting flexible domestication.By analyzing the difficulties and strategies of translating the drama scrips,this thesis hopes to shed some light on script translation.