A Report On C-E Translation Of Yunnan Drama Shuimang Grass From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As a local drama genre and a national intangible cultural heritage,Yunnan Drama(or Dian Drama)is unique with a high literary and artistic value for appreciation.The study of Yunnan Drama translation is an important innovation in promoting the exchange and mutual appreciation of human civilizations.As an excellent representative of Yunnan Drama,Shuimang Grass provides a classical story about the relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law from a refreshing,profound and spiritual redemption angle.The drama has won numerous awards including the Excellent Playwrighting of the13 th Chinese Art Festival in 2013,the Five Good-One Project Award of Spiritual Civilization Construction by the Publicity Department of the CPC Central Committee,and the Nominated Playwriting Prize in Cao Yu Playwriting Award in 2014.In the same year,the drama got the funding support from the National Arts Fund as well.In 2016,it won the Hibiscus Flower Award in the China-ASEAN Week of Drama.The dialogues in the drama script contains many distinctive Yunnan dialects,culture-loaded phrases,four-character idioms,interjections and modal particles.Moreover,its librettos are written in poetic style,close to poems with rhyming devices.The characters have distinctive linguistic features with rhetorical devices widely employed.These linguistic features and writing style of the script Shuimang Grass can bring about lots of difficulties in doing the C-E translation.This report adopts Relevance Theory as the translation guidance,providing the report on the C-E translation practice and study of the Yunnan Drama Shuimang Grass.The author of the report probes into the solutions to the difficulties in translating the drama script such as the translation of dialects which are locally culture-loaded and colloquial,the translation of interjections and modal particles,the translation of librettos(song words or lyrics)which are in two lines,four lines or multiple lines featured by rich rhetorical devices such as parallel structures,metaphors,allusions,intertextualities and anadiplosis as well as rhyming devices,and the translation of common sayings,four-character idioms together with two-part allegorical sayings which are also culture-loaded.The author tackles these translation issues from the perspective of the ostensive-inferential process,cognitive context,optimal relevance,the contextual function of words,properly embodying the utterers or the source text author’s informative and communicative intention while meeting target readers’ expectation,and the responsibility of the translator in terms of Relevance Theory.Methods of literal translation and free translation are flexibly chosen according to the needs of translation of intention and optimal relevance.Corresponding translation techniques such as addition,deletion,conversion,repetition,inversion and division are engaged when necessary.Research on the C-E translation of Yunnan drama scripts is rare.The author of this report adopts the Relevance Theory as his guidance to analyze and discuss the difficulties and corresponding solutions in the translation of Yunnan Drama Shuimang Grass for the purpose of displaying the charm of Yunnan Drama in the English world and providing some references for the translation of this type of genre.