A Comparative Study On The Translations Of King Lear By Liang Shiqiu And Zhu Shenghao From The Perspective Of Translational Poetics

William Shakespeare (1564——1616) is widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights and poets the world has ever known. Throughout his life, Shakespeare not only wrote many long poems and sonnets, but also left the world thirty seven splendid plays, which cover a wide range of subjects and themes. Among those plays, King Lear occupies an incomparable status due to its flexible use of language, successful shaping of characters, and skillful application of rhetorical devices. With the development of cross-cultural communication, Shakespeare’s works have been translated into various languages and performed all over the world. Among those Chinese scholars who have translated Shakespeare and his King Lear, Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao enjoy a great reputation. Although Liang’s and Zhu’s versions are both prosaic in style, there are still differences between them due to their different translational poetics.Based on Andre Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory, this thesis conducts a comparative study on Liang’s and Zhu’s versions of King Lear, so as to explore the translational poetics that cause the similarities and dissimilarities of them, and how these different translational poetics influence translators’choices of translation strategies. This thesis is divided into five parts, including the introduction and conclusion. It first puts forward the research questions, literature review and theoretical perspective of this thesis in the introduction. In addition, the author gives a brief introduction to the dominant poetics of Liang and Zhu’s time and their personal translational poetics, which provides a research background for the whole thesis. From Chapter One to Chapter Three, the author conducts a detailed analysis of Liang’s and Zhu’s versions of King Lear in the light of Lefevere’s Manipulation Theory. The poetological manipulation of language expression is analyzed from three levels, that is, the lexical level, the syntactical level, and the discourse level. Chapter One discusses the poetological constraints of the two versions at the lexical level during the course of translating terms of address, religious terms and other cultural terms. Chapter Two explores the influence of translational poetics on Zhu’s and Liang’s translations from the aspects of sentence structure, omission and addition, as well as figures of speech. Then in Chapter Three, the author discusses the poetological manipulation in translation at the discourse level, and makes a comparison of their different translational strategies adopted by analyzing how they deal with musicality, colloquialism and personalization. Finally, the author concludes that in the process of translating King Lear, Liang largely applies foreignization while Zhu favors domestication due to their different translational poetics. Through a detailed comparative study, a more fair and comprehensive evaluation of both the original work and the translations can be achieved.