Representation And Reconstruction Of Affect Meaning In Chinese Translations Of Shakespeare's Plays–A Corpus-based Study

William Shakespeare(1564-1616),the great British playwright,poet and thinker during the Renaissance,created a large body of plays presenting various themes,including the world-known Four Great Comedies and Four Great Tragedies.In these plays,Shakespeare paid much attention to affect,one of the core issues in drama creation,and successfully demonstrated the affections of different characters and affective conflicts between different characters,aiming to highlight the affective keys and themes of different plays.By means of linguistic elements and para-language,such as facial expressions,gestures,pitch,volume,intonation,etc.that convey emotions,the author has portrayed and highlighted the affections of different personae in a given context.In essence,what's behind the description of these affections is the author's personal appraisals towards the appraised,namely,the personae.That is to say,the abundant affective expressions used in these plays serve to foreground the author's appraisals or attitudes towards distinctive characters.Given the rich lexical realizations of the affect meaning in Shakespeare's plays,the present study attempted to explore the Chinese translation of affect meaning expressed in Shakespeare's plays,covering 8 comedies and 7 tragedies,with particular focus on representation and reconstruction of affect meaning in two Chinese versions,Liang Shiqiu's translation and Zhu Shenghao's translation(abbreviated as Liang's translations and Zhu's translations respectively).As a subjective social activity,translation process involves exertions of translator's subjectivity,which in turn shapes the finished product,i.e.,the final translation.Arguably,this nature of translation echoes the major concern of hermeneutics about understanding,that is,“understanding as translation”(Steiner 1975/2001).This hermeneutic concern about translation provides a concise but refined interpretation of the nature of translation,that is,translator's subjectivity plays an important role in the translator's understanding and elucidation of what a text means to him/her.Given the correlation between hermeneutics and translation,we adopted hermeneutics as the theoretical framework,and probed into the manifestations of translator's subjectivity in representing and reconstructing affect meaning by Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao respectively.Before conducting the very research,it's indispensable to provide a definition of affect.As one universal experience among human beings,affect is rather differently defined by different scholars.Given that the APPRAISAL system developed by Martin & White(2005)et al within Systemic Functional Linguistics puts special emphasis on and has made systematic analyses of affect,the present study reasonably adopted as the analytic framework the APPRAISAL system,specifically applying the definition and classification of affect within APPRAISAL.As defined in this system,feelings can be grouped into four primary categories,that is,DIS/INCLINATION,UN/HAPPINESS,IN/SECURITY,and DIS/SATISFACTION.Based on the APPRAISAL model as the analytical framework,this research attempted to systematically examine the translation of affect meaning,centering on how and to what extents Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao respectively represented and reconstructed the affect meaning in Shakespeare's plays.Regarding the research methodology,the study drew on the strengths of corpus method in translation studies,drama translation studies in particular.A parallel corpus of Chinese translations of Shakespeare's plays was applied to conduct the relevant study on translation of affect meaning.By use of software like ParaConc and WordSmith 6.0,this study exported and manually analyzed the concordance lines with English affect markers as the nodes,to examine how the affect meaning in the source text is represented and reconstructed by the two translators.Moreover,it looked at the application of typical Chinese affect markers in the two translations.The data collection and statistical analysis laid the basis for the follow-up comparisons of the two translations in representing and reconstructing affect meaning of Shakespeare's plays.First of all,this research explored representation of affect meaning.The comparisons suggest that in the two Chinese translations the tendency towards representation is significantly more prominent than the tendency towards reconstruction.Regardless of this similarity,the two translations are strikingly different in adoption of specific ways to represent affect meaning.On the one hand,Liang's translations present more conspicuous tendency towards representation,mostly by equivalent translation.On the other,Zhu's translations witness significantly higher frequency of inter-affect changes between the four affect types.In addition,they are rather distinctive in diction,i.e.,lexical realizations of affect meaning.Relatively speaking,Zhu's translations feature more typical colloquialism and greater variedness in the use of affective expressions.Secondly,the study focused on the reconstruction of affect meaning.Compared with representation tendency,conspicuous tendency towards reconstruction has been revealed by neither translation.However,these two Chinese versions still display some noteworthy similarities and disparities in reconstruction.Generally speaking,Zhu Shenghao reconstructed affect meaning to a significantly larger extent.Specifically,the two translators are distinct from each other in adoption of different methods to reconstruct affect meaning,particularly in terms of interpretive translation and amplification.Moreover,the two translations occasionally witness attitudinal shifts in reconstruction,namely,shifts between affect meaning and judgement or appreciation meaning.A close manual analysis demonstrates that in the TTs shifts between affect and judgement meaning occur much more frequently than shifts between affect and appreciation meaning.In addition,another eye-catching feature revealed in reconstruction lies in that the two translators seemed to be inclined to alter the positive affect meaning expressed in the source text to negative or neutral affect meaning in their translations but seldom changed the polarity of the originally negative affect meaning.This salience in polarity alterations is more typically presented by Liang's translations.In addition,the present research also examined the changes to graduation when a given affect meaning is represented or reconstructed by Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao.The findings show that in either case,representation or reconstruction,the two translators appeared to prefer scaling up rather than scaling down the affect meaning by use of some Chinese modifiers in the target text when it is compared with that of the source text.This remarkable up-scaling tendency revealed in the two translations is attributed to two major facets:the emphasis on enhancing dramatic effects upon the potential readers or audience,especially in communicating affections;and the frequent use of some typical Chinese adverbs of middle or middle high degree,such as“?/??”(meaning“very/quite/rather”),which contributed a lot to enhancing the value of what is modified.According to hermeneutics,understanding is rather subjective,involving the interpreter or translator's pre-understanding,prejudice,life experiences,horizon,and fusion of the horizons between the past and the present,and between the author's and the interpreter's,etc.All these elements reflect the interpreter's subjectivity in the comprehension and elucidation of a specific text.In the case of translation,particularly translation of affect meaning as concerned in this study,the translator's subjectivity runs during the whole process of translation and is collectively embodied in the translation products,including the historical background situating the translation activity,translator's bilingual competence,adoption of translation methods,language uses,the translator's attitudes or appraisals,etc.As far as this study is concerned,the exertions of translator's subjective are collectively manifested in the representation and reconstruction of affect meaning by Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao.To account for the aforesaid similarities and differences between the two translations,explanations were made from three primary aspects of translator's subjectivity: translation purposes,translation principles,and the target readers their translations cater to.Finally,the study also pointed out two main limitations in the research.One is that the research scope is somewhat limited since it only focused on the top 30 affect markers in the 15 Shakespeare's plays and the top 30 Chinese affect markers in the two translations respectively.Moreover,the study exclusively probed into the inscribed affect meaning denoted by single word rather than word groups or phrases.The other deals with the unavoidable influences from the researcher's subjectivity in the rating process,particularly in deciding whether a given word really expresses certain affect meaning or other attitudinal meanings like judgement or appreciation in the specific context.Specific to above-mentioned limitations,the study provided some suggestions for the future studies.Firstly,the research scope can be reasonably widened to involve more Shakespeare's plays,for instance,history plays;and to cover more affective expressions in exclusion to the explicit affect meaning,such as metaphors,word groups and clauses that bear affect meaning,etc.Besides,future studies can try more objective rating methods to ensure more valid research findings and discussions.