A Probe Into Ying Ruocheng’s Foregrounding Translation Strategy In Drama

In order to fill the gap between foregrounding theory and its application in drama translation, this thesis makes a tentative research on Ying Ruocheng’s drama translation from the new perspective of foregrounding translation.Ying Ruocheng, an eminent drama translator, talent director and excellent actor, has done great contribution to Chinese drama translation. After a detailed comparative research between the original texts and his translations, the author finds that Ying has paid great attention to the foregrounding languages during his translation process. His ingenious arrangement of foregrounding translation, which obeys the foregrounding and its translation theory, has made his translations uniform with the original ones both in form and spirit. And the concluding remarks point to the fact that Ying’s translation strategy of foregrounding has brought his translation great success. Therefore his strategy of translating foregrounding languages is worth carefully studying.Foregrounding theory is one of the most important concepts in stylistics. It is widely used in linguistics, stylistics and literary study but little research has been done with it on its translation, let alone drama translation.With Ye Zinan’s foregrounding translation theory and Geoffrey Leech’s classification of "quantitative foregrounding" and "qualitative foregrounding" as the theoretical basis, this thesis not only does a detailed study on lexical deviation, phonological deviation, semantic deviation, dialectal deviation and grammatical deviation of "qualitative foregrounding", but also on parallelism and repetition of "quantitative foregrounding" which appeared frequently in Ying’s translation. The author also summarizes Ying’s three foregrounding translation principles-colloquialism, performability, intelligibility, and his translation methods---literal translation, addition, omission, borrowing, compensation in this thesis.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter One includes the research background, research purpose, renovation points and significance of the research and the structure of the thesis. Literature Review in Chapter Two carries on foregrounding theory, its application on translation, the related theory used in the thesis and previous studies on Ying Ruocheng. In Chapter Three, both qualitative and quantitative foregrounding in Ying’s drama translation will be illustrated respectively. Ying’s translation principles and methods of foregrounding languages will be summarized in Chapter Four. And in the final part, conclusion and limitations of this thesis will be given. The author hopes this thesis will do some help for the further study of foregrounding translation strategy of Ying Ruocheng’s drama translation.