As the development of cultural undertakings, Chinese people have more diversified demands on art and voices for musicals are getting higher and higher. Musical is a form of theatrical performance which combines dialogues, music, movement, lightening and sounding technology as an integrated whole.it was born in western countries in the twentieth century, and enjoyed the highest popularity in American Broadway and the Western Zone in the United Kingdom. In the 1980s musicals entered Chinese music market, and the first musical in China was The Young Man of the Present, which was created by the Central Opera House, then, in the early 21st century, the western musical Cat was …show more content…
The origin of song translation in China can be dated back to the Qing Dynasty with the first foreign song The Last Summer Rose translated into Chinese by Liu Bannong and one of the most representative works of that era Marching to Georgia translated by Mr. Ye Zhongleng in 1908. In modern times, more and more foreign songs have been translated into Chinese with a large number of which are widely sung in China, such as Edelweiss(《雪绒花》) and The Evening of the Moscow Outskirts (《莫斯科郊外的晚上》)and so on. Xue Fan, a famous song translator in China published the first academic work of song translation called Research and Practice of Song Translation(《歌曲翻译探究与实践》), which contains a lot of song translation works and showed his understanding of song translation theory, methodology and teleology of high perspicacity. More researches on song translation have been conducted abroad with many foreign song translation scholars putting forwards strategies and criteria for song translation. One of the most famous work is Peter Low's pentathlon translation strategy, which contains five criteria in song translation namely the singability, sense, naturalness, rhythm and rhyme of translated …show more content…
However, there is only one piece of song has already had a Chinese version, that is, The Phantom of the Opera sung by Fei Xiang. Setting the song The Phantom of the Opera as an example, this paper will firstly explore through the officially published video the in depth meaning expressed by the non-textual information including actions of actors, sounding and lightening in the stage by the theory provided in The Grammar of Visual Design written by Kress and Leeuwen and the theory of sound montage. After well comprehending the meaning of the song, the Pentathlon Principles of Peter Low will be used to assess the existed Chinese version, which will be followed by a modification of the original translation combining theories and assessment