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Though a lot of Shakespeare’s plays are preserved and enjoyed in the form oftext, there is no denying that they were written for a performing purpose in the firstplace and that much of their value still lies in stage performance. As a matter of fact,most of Shakespeare’s famous plays that have been staged in China have beenperformed in the Chinese language, whose acceptability greatly relies on thereproduction of the performability in the Chinese version. Even for those plays thatare appreciated on page instead of on stage, the readers would still picture themselvessitting in a theatre and visualize the words into real performance, thus indicating thenecessity of drama translations’ being performable. The Tempest is a play perfect forstage performance. Its fictive setting, magic effect and intriguing plot can only befully realized through actual performance. Therefore, performability is certainly oneimportant standard for its Chinese versions.Bassnett (1998: 95) dismisses performability as a criterion for drama translationevaluation because she thinks performability is an abstract concept that varies fromculture to culture. However, when a certain culture is singled out and studied, it ispossible to define and subdivide performability and use it as a criterion to assessdrama translations. Performability can be understood in three dimensions. From atextual point of view, performability means the play script can be uttered fluidly andnaturally by the actors, which is also referred to as “breathability” (Espasa, 2000: 49).From a theatrical point of view, performability refers to the “pragmatic use of scenicinstrument” to manifest the text and visualize the words (Pavis, 1983, cited in Espasa,2000: 52). It can also be seen as “the gestic dimension embedded in the text, waitingto be realized” (Bassnett, 1991: 99). From an ideological point of view, performabilityis closely linked to the target-language audience acceptance of the translated play. Inthis way, performability can be further divided into speakability, actability andtarget-language audience acceptability (Windle, 2011: 155).

4.1 Speakability

As a performing art, drama largely depends on spoken language, thus indicatingthe necessity of the text’s speakability. It requires that the text be written in rhythmiclanguage in appropriate length. In addition, most of the time the dialogues need to becolloquial so that the audience can capture them right at the moment they are spoken.Apart from the spoken words, some of the lines need to be sung, which leads toanother facet of drama- musicality.

4.2 Actability

The communication function of drama is not solely realized through written orspoken language; it also relies on visual signs such as gestures, facial expressions andbody positions (Hubenka and Garcia, 1973: 41). The audience can get bored anddisappointed when seeing a dull and incipient performance where the actor does notenhance the power of his line with appropriate movement or convincing facialexpressions (Hubenka and Garcia, 1973: 41). Therefore, in the dimension of actability,a good play requires two elem本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。