A Descriptive Study Of Two Chinese Versions Of Romeo And Juliet

Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao are two representatives who rendered Shakespeare'splays in the form of prose in vernacular Chinese. There have been many studies on the twotranslators, however, most of them adopted the prescriptive approach and made comments ontheir translations, instead of trying to observe the facts and finding out the reasons for thesegood translations. The present author intends to conduct a study of the relevant issues of thetwo translators and their versions: What strategies did they apply in their translation? Whatare the contributing factors for the translators'choices of strategies? In what way did thesefactors affect their translation strategies?This thesis chooses the two different versions (Mr. Liang Shiqiu's and Mr. ZhuShenghao's) of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet as a case study, compares the translationstrategies applied in dealing with Shakespeare's language. Then the contributing factors fortheir strategies are to be discussed: their purposes, sponsors and backgrounds.In Chapter 1, the nature of Shakespeare's plays and difficulty in translation areintroduced. The duality of drama—on the page and on the stage makes the translation ofdrama a complicated and problematical task, and the unique feature of Shakespeare'slanguage (such as the use of blank verse, cultural allusions and rhetorical devices, etc.) makesthe translation of Shakespearean drama more difficult.Chapter 2 is a general review of the study and translation of Shakespeare in China, andprevious studies on the two translators—Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao.In Chapter 3, the two Chinese versions of Romeo and Juliet and strategies exerted areanalyzed on the aspect of how they dealt with puns, appellations, cultural allusions, blankverse, and vulgar words. Through analyzing facts we find that they both rendered thedominant form, blank verse, into prose in vernacular Chinese, yet Liang Shiqiu adopted literal translation and added annotation where difficult to understand while Zhu Shenghao adoptedfree translation and changed some of the content to make the translation more fluent andeasier to understand.The last chapter gives a detailed description of factors that influence the two translators'strategies. Liang Shiqiu's purpose was to answer for Hu Shi's initiation and"to Read FirstClass Books"and he chose to translate Shakespeare's plays and adopted literal translation,trying to preserve the original taste, while Zhu Shenghao's purpose was to popularizeShakespeare's drama by performance, so Zhu adopted free translation and changed somecontents of the original text to conform to the Chinese readers'tastes and to make it suitablefor the stage; Liang Shiqiu's sponsor Hu Shi made detailed requirements to Liang'stranslation, while Zhu Shenghao's sponsor Zhan Wenhu made no requirement to Zhu'translation, therefore, there are many annotations in Liang's version while few annotations inZhu's version; Liang and Zhu's different educational backgrounds influenced their differentstyles of translation, and the cultural background and poetics at that time contributed to theiradoption of vernacular Chinese and Prose form.This thesis intends to conclude that the translation strategies of translators have much todo with such contributing factors as purposes, sponsors, social and cultural backgrounds. Bythis thesis, I hope that more facts will be described and analyzed, and more contributingfactors for translators'choices of strategies will be explored.