Performability and translation : a case study of the production and reception of Ying Ruocheng’s translations

The active scholarly contribution made by practitioners of theatre translation in the past decades has turned the research area into what is now considered a burgeoning field. Despite recent developments, it seems that performability, a long-discussed yet controversial concept in the study of theatre translation, would remain part of the practitioners’ discourse. Based on a historical survey of the production and reception of the translations of Anglo-American plays by Chinese actor-director Ying Ruocheng (1929-2003) in and around the 1980s, this study explores how the performability, or theatrical potential, of a translated playtext is constructed through the negotiation between/among the norms mainly operating on three levels—the textual, the theatrical and the socio-cultural—and the agency of the individuals involved. This thesis chooses to focus on Ying because he not only was one of the most successful theatre translators in contemporary Mainland China, but also seems to be an “impossible” ideal, considering his accomplishments in translating, acting, directing and as culture diplomat. Acknowledging that performability, which is essentially fluid and constructed, this descriptive-analytical survey will cover a whole range of possible activities involved in the production and reception of a translated playtext, and put the translator’s seemingly ideal status into perspective. The broadening of the scope of investigation is crucial to the outcome of this thesis, and recommendable to future researchers of theatre translation studies. In this study, translated playtexts and their stage productions are treated as the products of the receiving linguistic, theatrical and socio-cultural systems. The investigation begins with an evaluation of Ying’s practice against his stated translation principles to identify the textual and extra-textual factors that might have governed his work as a translator in reality. The discussion emphasises that performability cannot be realised through the textual medium only, before moving on to the exploration of the performers’ attempts to negotiate with his texts for theatrical enactment. The investigation, which examines the actions taken by the theatrical institution and individual actors in two separate chapters, draws attention to the roles of the translational, theatrical and socio-cultural norms and the power dynamics between the translator and his theatrical collaborators in their efforts to ‘ensure’ or create performability. The discussion is followed by an analysis concentrating on Ying’s role as a mediator within the production process and between the productions and the target environment, which is crucial to the achievement of both the immediate success of the productions and the transfer of repertoire. The study concludes that while a theatre translator and his or her theatrical collaborators are subject to various systemic constraints, the translator can find more power in his or her mediatory role as a bilingualist and biculturalist and promote the performability of the text

Slip and Jump Coefficients for General Gas-Surface Interactions According to the Moment Method

We develop a moment method based on the Hermite series of arbitrary order to calculate viscous-slip, thermal-slip, and temperature-jump coefficients for general gas-surface scattering kernels. Under some usual assumptions of scattering kernels, the solvability is obtained by showing the positive definiteness of the symmetric coefficient matrix in the boundary conditions. For gas flows with the Cercignani-Lampis gas-surface interaction and inverse-power-law intermolecular potentials, the model can capture the slip and jump coefficients accurately with elegant analytic expressions. On the one hand, the proposed method can apply to the cases of arbitrary order moments with increasing accuracy. On the other hand, the explicit formulae for low-order situations are simpler and more accurate than some existing results in references. Therefore, one may apply these formulae in slip and jump conditions to improve the accuracy of macroscopic fluid dynamic models for gas flows

Emergence of Locally Suboptimal Behavior in Finitely Repeated Games

We study the emergence of locally suboptimal behavior in finitely repeated games. Locally suboptimal behavior refers to players play suboptimally in some rounds of the repeated game (i.e., not maximizing their payoffs in those rounds) while maximizing their total payoffs in the whole repeated game. The central research question we aim to answer is when locally suboptimal behavior can arise from rational play in finitely repeated games. In this research, we focus on the emergence of locally suboptimal behavior in subgame-perfect equilibria (SPE) of finitely repeated games with complete information. We prove the first sufficient and necessary condition on the stage game G that ensure that, for all T and all subgame-perfect equilibria of the repeated game G(T), the strategy profile at every round of G(T) forms a Nash equilibrium of the stage game G. We prove the sufficient and necessary conditions for three cases: 1) only pure strategies are allowed, 2) the general case where mixed strategies are allowed, and 3) one player can only use pure strategies and the other player can use mixed strategies. Based on these results, we obtain complete characterizations on when allowing players to play mixed strategies will change whether local suboptimality can ever occur in some repeated game. Furthermore, we present an algorithm for the computational problem of, given an arbitrary stage game, deciding if locally suboptimal behavior can arise in the corresponding finitely repeated games. This addresses the practical side of the research question

Regência verbal e mudança semântica: os casos de dar, ficar, passar e acabar

A regência verbal estuda as relações entre os verbos e os seus complementos. Em português, os verbos transitivos indiretos implicam o uso de uma preposição a reger um complemento. Nesses casos de regência verbal indireta, apenas algumas preposições podem ligar o regente ao regido e esse uso específico dá origem a mudanças de significado, o que causa vários problemas a nível interpretativo para os alunos chineses. Este trabalho visa compreender e analisar as dificuldades sentidas por alunos chineses na mudança de sentido provocada pelas diferentes regências dos verbos dar, ficar, passar e acabar. A aplicação de um inquérito a estudantes chineses da Universidade de Aveiro permitiu concluir que, por exemplo, há desconhecimento da totalidade das regências dos verbos e respetivos significados, e aplicação insuficiente das regências em contexto de aula e no quotidiano. Em virtude dos resultados, tecem-se, no final, algumas considerações para a melhoria do processo de ensino-aprendizagem.Verbal regency studies the relationships between verbs and their complements. In Portuguese, indirect transitive verbs use a preposition to introduce a complement. In these cases of indirect verbal regency, only a few prepositions can bind the regent to the governed and this specific use gives rise to the changes of meaning, which causes several interpretive problems for Chinese students. This dissertation aims to understand and analyze difficulties of Chinese students due to the change of meaning caused by different regencies of the verbs (dar, ficar, passar and acabar). With the application of questionnaires to Chinese students at University of Aveiro, we concluded that students don’t know all the regencies and meanings of these verbs and don’t apply them sufficiently during classes and in their daily life. Due to the results, we present some considerations regarding the improvement of teaching and learning methodologies.Mestrado em Português Língua Estrangeira/Língua Segund