A Comparative Study Of Strategies Of Ying Ruocheng's Drama Translation

The experience of Ying Ruocheng as a renowned actor, director and drama translator in China has provided unique source materials for studies of drama translation, yet not many researches have been done on the strategies of his drama translation. This thesis gives a case study of the translation strategies adopted by Ying Ruocheng for stage performance based on the detailed analysis of the C-E translation of Teahouse and the E-C translation of Death of a Salesman. The purpose of the study is two-fold. One is to look into the stage-oriented strategies of Ying's drama translation in comparison with that non-dramatists'. The other is to examine the controversial problem of translating-in and translating-out by comparing Ying's translating-out with a native speaker's translating-in of the same work Teahouse. Following a descriptive approach, the author adopts skopostheory as the theoretical framework, focusing on such concepts as"text typology","skopos"and"translation brief", to conduct a holistic comparative study on the strategies of Ying's drama translation with reference to Ying's translation principles.In this paper, the horizontal and vertical comparisons of Ying's translation strategies are carried out respectively in Teahouse and Death of a Salesman. By horizontal comparison the thesis means the comparison of the strategies adopted by Ying with those adopted by other translators. By vertical comparison, the author means two things: i) to compare Ying's own different strategies when translating dramas in (from English into Chinese) and out (from Chinese into English), and ii) to compare strategies adopted by himself in the page with those on the stage when translating the same drama.The research, in horizontal comparison, reveals different strategies between Ying Ruocheng and other translators in translating the same drama. Ying's translation is oriented to"performability"and"effect on the stage", trying to reproducing the expressive function of the original and its operative feasibility while other translators pay much attention to the transference of information. In vertical comparison, Ying's specific strategies used in translating-in and translating-out are found there to be no great differences as they serve the same translation purpose in concord with the same orientation towards the stage effect, and the slight differences in strategies lie only in different language mediums used in drama translation. As a qualified translator, Ying has succeeded not only in translating-in but also in translating-out dramas and putting them on the stage. His translation experiences have provided convincing evidence counteracting restrictions upon doing inverse translation imposed by some international translation organizations.In addition,another enlightenment that surfaces from the comparative study between Ying's translation strategies in the page and on the stage is that once a translation for the stage is published, it is inevitable to do some revising and polishing, so the original translation on the stage is hard to be kept intact. Therefore, in the study of the performance-oriented drama translation the first-hand materials should be the recorded lines in the real stage performance rather than the published works for the reader.To sum up, this research is an attempt to apply skopostheory to the comparative study of Ying Ruocheng's strategies in drama translation, including both horizontal and vertical comparison, and hopefully its findings will promote researches in the same line.