A Context-Based Perspective On Pragmatic Equivalence In Stage-Oriented Drama Translation

Compared with the study on fiction and poetry translation, less attention has been paid to drama translation studies for a long time. Despite the recent growing interest in this field, in most cases, especially in China, drama is studied as a literary text, and the over-emphasis on its literary nature—"readability" leads to the neglect of the other nature—"performability". Drama is a kind of literary text; however, when performed on stage, it is an integral part of a theatrical production, along with costume, lighting, etc. As a result, its duality makes it difficult to have a unified criterion in drama translation. This thesis focuses on performability, so its object of study is stage-oriented drama. Uncle Doggie’s Nirvana, translated into English by Ying Ruocheng and proven a successful stage-oriented drama, is chosen for analysis in the case study.Equivalence, a central concept in translation studies, can be approached at semantic, syntactic and pragmatic levels. Blind adherence to semantic equivalence and syntactic equivalence brings about unnatural and obscure translation. Comparatively speaking, pragmatic translation is better able to deal with the tension between "faithfulness" and "expressiveness" in stage-oriented drama translation. Context plays a significant role in pragmatics, is of much help in solving the conflicts arising in terms of the equivalence at pragmatic, semantic and syntactic levels, and serves as a useful benchmark to make a choice among function, content and form.This thesis intends to make a study on stage-oriented drama translation by means of both context theory and pragmatic equivalence. In short, there are two fundamental questions to be verified in this thesis:to demonstrate the importance and priority of pragmatic equivalence in drama translation; and to illustrate the pragmatic equivalence can be achieved with the help of various contexts. Additionally, through an analysis of examples collected from Uncle Doggie s Nirvana, it is found that Ying Ruocheng adopts a variety of translation methods to achieve pragmatic equivalence, and compared with foreignization, domestication has a wider application.