Stage-oriented Drama Translation And Its Process

As an important component of literature, drama has a distinct characteristic different from those of other literary genres. It is a combination of the art of language, the art of performance, music, etc. This comprehensive artistic specialty of drama results in the difficulty in drama translation, for a playtext can be translated as a literary piece for readers to enjoy, and can be rendered for audience to appreciate on stage as well. The reader-oriented and audience-oriented dualistic feature of drama translation poses great obstacles to drama translation studies. Up till now, compared with other literary works, researches on drama translation are far fewer and lack of guiding theory, and there is even less study on the translation of drama for theatrical performance. In order to make a little contribution to the change of this situation and provide a new theoretical perspective for the researches on drama translation in general, the present thesis tries to carry out an analysis of the translation of drama for stage performance and the whole translation process from the angle of Nord's functionalist approach to translation.Similar to the skopos theory, Nord's functionalist theory advocates that the purpose of translation should be the first and foremost consideration in translation. It is decided by the initiator of the translation in accordance with the expected receivers. Thus, as for translating drama for theatrical performance, the purpose of skopos of theatrical performance decides all the following translation activities. According to Nord's circular model, after finding out the skopos, the translator is supposed to take out a thorough source-text analysis in terms of intra- and extra-textual factors, so as to determine what text elements should be reproduced as close as possible to the source text and what functional elements should be adapted according to the target receivers'background knowledge, expectations and communication requirements, etc. In this way, the translator can easily locate possible problems in translation and then adopts corresponding translation techniques.The author takes Xu Yuanchong's C-E translation of The Peony Pavilion as an example to simulate the circular model. The Peony Pavilion is a typical closet drama and there are a great number of culture-loaded words and phrases in it. As a consequence, when translating it into an English version suitable for performance, Professor Xu probably has done a text analysis of the source text, compared the skopos of the target text with the functions of the source text, and consequently distinguished or deleted elements of rich cultural connotations for they are unfavorable to the achievement of the skopos of the target text. In the practical translation activity, he paraphrases the majority of those words or phrases but at the same time follows his Three Beauties principle. He adopts a lot of translation techniques such as word order reversing, adding word(s) to save rhyme, rendering one line into two, using run-on lines to achieve beauty in sound, beauty in meaning and beauty in form.