Hamlet Translation

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Shakespeare’s works are timeless that even in the 21st-century people are still researching and praising him. New commentaries and translations of his masterpieces are printing every day. In this report, three Chinese translations of Hamlet, by Ching-Hsi Perng(2001), Tung-Chi Lin(1982) and Zhu Shenghao(1994). As mentioned, Shakespeare’s plays are regarded as the greatest western literature. Translating Shakespearean plays, compared with other genres, translators are required to be highly skilled with superior language artistry and deep cultural understanding of Shakespearean time. The three Chinese versions of Hamlet focused on this paper, translated directly from English, are presented and accepted as translations. They are translated by…show more content…
Perng employed localization in this coupled pair. ‘Come’ is rendered as '來' and ‘go’ ‘去', a neologism that means ‘what the hell.’ The translation kept some elements from the source text and added some local word usage, like ‘這一套’. He also employed the technique of transposition, which is one of the procedure Vinay and Darbelnet considered covered in oblique translations. The verbs, 'answer' and 'question', in ST are converted into nouns, ‘回答’ and ‘問題’ in the target text. For Lin, he followed the repetition in the source text, ‘怎麼怎麼’ and ‘算了算了’ and added ‘了’ and ‘吧' to comply with the Chinese dialogue norm, which includes many sentence-final particles to express one’s emotions or feelings. ‘探聽’, translation for ‘question’, is a verb commonly used in classical Chinese literature, which means ‘to snoop around or to pry into something.’ Furthermore, the latter part of the sentence mimics the style of a Chinese couplet. The word choices enhance the aesthetic atmosphere in the translation. Zhu directly translated the first part of the lines, while for the latter part, he changed the declarative lines in ST into imperatives in TT, employing the technique of modulation. The adjective ‘胡說八道’ is also used twice, which contributes to the story’s line that Hamlet is losing his mind that he does not know what he is…show more content…
According to Cambridge dictionary, ‘a rat’ informally means an unpleasant person who deceives others or is not loyal, which is Hamlet’s opinion towards the King. Perng and Lin translated ‘rat’ into ‘老鼠’ and ‘耗子’. These translations are also negative in the target culture. Nevertheless, people might think it is really a ‘老鼠’ or ‘耗子’ Hamlet intended to kill. Lin compensated this with a localization term, ‘狗命’ in the latter part. Not only did he used another idiomatic Chinese animal phrase, it shows his actual intention to kill the King. ‘Ducat’ was a gold coin in European countries in the past. For Perng’s, he directly translated the latter part of the line. The homonyms ‘幣’ and ‘斃’ might be an attempt wordplay but it is meaningless. Zhu used a colloquial Chinese word ‘鼠賊’ to render ‘rat’, which avoid the problem Perng’s translation might have. In the latter part of the line, Zhu used ‘結果你’ as in ‘to finish you’, to bring the King’s life to an end. This word-for-word translation of ‘finish’ is not suitable. A better translation would be ‘結束你'. The original meaning of that line is that Hamlet ‘bet a ducat that the King is dead.’ All three translators failed to convey the meaning of this

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