Application Of Functional Equivalence In Drama Translation

Drama is a comprehensive art full of various elements including literary language,stage direction,music and settings to create characters and reflect the social life.Drama translation requires coherence and literariness.And it also needs to consider the features of spoken language in the play text.A successful translation should make the target readers have the same feeling as the source-text readers after reading the whole text.The "functional equivalence" principle was proposed by American translation theorist Eugene Nida,who holds that translators should make the receptors understand the source text to the maximum extent and as accurately as possible.In this report.the author tries to analyze the language of the play text by applying Nida's theory of functional equivalence.The Price was written by American playwright Arthur Miller.It is a family drama in the setting of American economic depression in 1925.It reveals the impact of the economic depression on human nature and families.In the play text,the conflicts among the characters are shown in the form of dialogues.Based on functional equivalence theory,this report tries to make an in-depth analysis at the lexical level,syntactic level and dialogue level.In terms of lexical level,there are many foreign proper nouns,abstract words and other difficult words.In view of this phenomenon,the author applies such strategies and methods as domestication,transformation of abstract concepts into concrete ones,conversion of part of speech and conversion of word meaning to solve the problems.In terms of syntactic level,the difficulties mainly lie in the long and difficult sentences and colloquial expressions.The author uses the methods of inversion,free translation and amplification to deal with it.At the dialogue level,Chinese modal particles can be added to deal with the translation of tone and intonation.Based on the functional equivalence theory,this report analyzes the play text,points out the translation difficulties,and puts forward practical translation methods and strategies in combination with the translation practice.It hopes that the translation methods and strategies proposed in this report can provide insights into the translation of similar literary genres.