Secondary Orality Rewriting In The Translation Of Pygmalion By Yang Xianyi

This thesis analyzes secondary orality in the original text of Bernard Shaw’s five-act play Pygmalion and the reproduction of "secondary orality"(Ong,2002)in the translation of the play by Yang Xianyi from the cultural perspective.It adopts Andre Lefevere’s theory of "rewriting"(Lefevere,2010)and Walter Ong’s theory about orality and literacy as the foundation of its theoretical framework.The two theorists are pioneers in the cultural turn of translation studies and the theory of secondary orality respectively.This research is conducted to further clarify the nature of orality in drama translation beyond the linguistic dimension,making it clear that the wrritten text of the play on page is neither purely written nor purely oral language but secondary oral language,and filling the gap between the translation of oral texts and cultural approaches in translation studies by specifying "culture" into oral conventions or mentality in oral cultures.At the operational level,the analysis,sometimes aided by dictionaries,is carried out phonologically,lexically,phrasally and syntactically with statistics,examples and comparisons to mirror the oral mentality in the translated text by Yang Xianyi.This research has found:firstly,secondary orality has been written by Bernard Shaw in the original work via spelling the local accent on page,the use of certain formulas,colloquial words including idioms and slangs,formulas and the misuse of words and grammar that conform to orality featuring dependence on sound,vernacular and formulas;secondly,secondary orality has been rewritten by Yang Xianyi through the frequent use of alliterative and rhyming compounds,reiterative locutions,Erhua(儿化),idiomatic words from dialects such as "咱",formulaic phrases and formulaic sentence patterns which altogether demonstrate sound-loaded,empathetic and participatory,dialectal and formulaic thinking patterns of orality.This thesis is supposed to enrich our current understanding of Lefevere’s rewriting theory by specifying "culture" into orality as a non-linguistic code and operational "unit" of translation that should have been put on more emphasis by Lefevere.In addition,it adds the cultural dimension to previous studies on orality in drama translation.