A translator on the target stage: Ying Ruocheng’s theatre translation

Ying Ruocheng, an admirable artist in China and abroad, was responsible for the translation and production of many foreign plays in China and Chinese plays abroad, with which Ying played an important role in transforming China’s cultural life, encouraging international exchange and promoting modern drama. Based on his experience in drama and film acting and directing as well as translating, he argues that the major concern of theatre translation is its performability and speakability, which can be achieved through the recreation of the orality and gestic text with each role’s unique discourse and individuality. The paper is focused on researches on Ying’s text choice and his dramatic dialogue translation to explore the characteristics of his theatre translation and influence. The study selected his two well known translations and productions in the target theatre Death of a Salesman (English to Chinese) and The Family (Chinese to English) as case studies. Text processing software Concordance 3.0 and TextPreProcessing were used to collect appropriate data. Through the careful data analysis from the aspects of word frequency, sentence length, discourse markers and deixis, Ying Ruocheng’s idea of performability in theatrical translation were proved to be true, which demonstrates his discriminating taste of dramaturgical art and his great influence on Chinese modern drama.