Drama Translation: Approaches And Principles

In the history of Translation Studies, drama translation hasn't got its deserving place in comparison with other types of translation. This strange phenomenon has been pointed out by such noted experts as Susan Bassnett, "There is very little material on the special problems of translating dramatic texts, and the statements of individual theatre translators often imply that the methodology used in the translation process is the same as that used to approach texts." (Bassnett, 2004: 119) In the neglected and complex field of drama translation, there has been little consensus on its translation unit (TU) up till now. Normally sentence is regarded as the natural TU in the translating process, but it doesn't seem applicable to drama translation, for dramas are often comprised of dialogues between different characters, and only in dialogues can the meaning of each utterance be specified, thus the thesis author proposed that in drama translation, dialogues should be considered as the TU. Besides, in order to put TL readers or audience at their ease, more efforts should be made to reproduce the SL text's pragmatic suppositions and apply appropriate strategies to render cultural-bound terms. With the case study of Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's translation of Dou E Yuan, this paper is intended to explore the general principles of and approaches to drama translation. Meanwhile, efforts have also been exerted to indicate some mistranslation in Yang Hsien-yi and Gladys Yang's version.