| During 300 hundred years or so after the first publication of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in 1623, the 37 dramas have been translated into many languages. From the very beginning of the 20th century, translators in China began to introduce Shakespeare's dramas piecemeal. With the social and cultural development and the theoretical improvement in the discipline of translation, new versions are being brought forth continually.One of the unique features of Shakespeare's works is that they were basically written in blank verse, a literary form which is absent in Chinese literature. Thus the Chinese translators were, and still are, confronted with the problem of whether to render Shakespearean blank verse in prose or in verse. In terms of the literary forms they adopted, the Chinese translators can be divided into two schools. The first school consists of those who translated blank verse in the form of prose, and the other school, of those who translated blank verse in the form of verse.It has always been a controversial issue whether to translate Shakespearean blank verse in prose or in verse. With the theory of the transposition of blank verse from English into Chinese as a theoretical basis, the author has compared five translated versions of one of the most famous tragedies of Shakespeare─Othello in an effort to analyze the superiority of the versions in which blank verse is rendered in the form of verse over those in which blank verse is translated in prose. The conclusion reached here is that the versions in prose played an important role in popularizing Shakespeare's dramas in China, yet the approach of translating Shakespearean blank verse in verse has on the whole surpassed the other approach for the reason that the former is more faithful in form to the original, by which the original flavor of dramatic poetry is kept. Moreover, the respective dramatic functions of another two media in the plays, i.e. prose and rhymed verse, are reproduced to the full.
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