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Chapter One Introduction

It is well known that drama translation is a kind of special literature translation, whichis different from other literature translation and has its own features. The differenttranslators will adopt disparate strategies in the process of drama translation. However, animportant question should be considered by any translator to think over seriously. That is tosay, how translator can accurately translate the drama works to convey the original author‘smeaning to make the target language audience understand it. This is a hard task for dramatranslator to achieve. This paper makes great efforts to study what the translation strategiesof drama translators used in their versions, focusing on the perspective of language andculture.The translation of foreign drama boasts a history of about one hundred years in China.At the beginning of 1920s, the Eugene O‘Neill and his dramas were brought to China. Afterdecades, his dramas set off two climaxes in China in 1930s and in 1980s. Given this, hisdramas were translated by numerous translators or scholars in China. Influenced byChinese traditional culture and familiar with the Eastern philosophy, O‘Neil made hisworks resonate with Chinese translators and readers. All of these paved a way for hisdramas into China and his dramas have a positive influence for the development of Chinesemodern drama. Beyond the Horizon is the first full-length play of Eugene O‘Neill, theauthor choose this drama as the material to analyze the exoticism and acceptability in theChinese versions, and then intends to find out how the Chinese translated versions achievethe balance of exoticism and acceptability in language and culture.

1.1 Background of the study
Drama is a special form of literature. The development of Chinese drama is manyyears after the western country. Some people say that ―the Chinese drama is the importedgoods from western countries. However, the western drama has a lot of differences fromChinese drama. The Chinese people begin to introduce western drama into China after theNew Culture Movement so that the researches about the practice and theory of dramatranslation in China started later and developed slowly. In China, the translation of westerndrama started around in the very late nineteenth and early twentieth century, so far therehave been one hundred years of history and Chinese drama was born under the influence ofdrama translation.Drama translation involves the transaction of two languages and cultures, which arethe core elements of drama translation. The Australia drama translator, OrtrunZuber-Skerritt, who once made a definition on drama translation in an article of the scienceof drama translation ―drama translation is the translation of the dramatic text from onelanguage and culture into another and as the transposition of the original, translated oradapted text onto the stage.(Zubert-Skerrit, 1988:485)Since the late seventies of last century, increasing foreign dramas were brought intoChina. Several years later, there is an article about the American modern Dramatist EugeneO’Neill was published in the journal of Theatre Studies, which was the first dissertation onEugene O‘Neill‘s drama after the founding the people‘s republic of China. From there,Chinese scholars and translators devoted considerable attention to Eugene O‘Neill‘s playand his works set off a climax in China. We can find out a great many papers to studyO‘Neill‘s dramas in recent d