A Contrastive Study Of The Hybridity In Versions Of Shakespeare's Hamlet

The word"hybrid"was first used in various fields of natural science and then spread to many academic disciplines of social science, like linguistics, literary criticism and cultural studies. However, the basic meaning of the term remains the same in all these disciplines, referring to something that grows out of two or more closely interacting things. This new hybrid exhibits the characteristics of its matrices, but also shows unique features of its own and bears obvious advantages which are not borne by the matrices.In the field of translation studies, the phenomenon of hybridity is also conspicuous. Since literary translation involves different languages, cultures and literary modes, which will clash, melt and blend into a"hybrid"target text in translating. In the target text, the source text will inevitably leave some traces, which can never be avoided no matter how hard it is meant to. Eventually, such traces produce hybridity in the target text.Translators and translation scholars are long confined to the dichotomies of literal and free translation, foreignization and domestication, translatability and untranslatability, but the study of hybridity in translation can surpass the contradictions of these dichotomies and result in a harmonious co-existence. The researchers in the field of hybridity hold that all translations are hybrids with the only difference of degrees of hybridity;the hybridity in translation can optimize and transcend the cultural system of the target language, and effectively undermine the cultural hegemony as well.Hybridity is not only a universal phenomenon in translation but also is a new area of interest in the field of translation studies. As far as it is known, few scholars have approached hybridity in an English-Chinese translation from the perspectives of culture, literature and linguistics. This thesis is meant to conduct a comparative study of hybridity in Zhu Shenghao's and Bian Zhilin's (and Fang Ping's if necessary) versions of Hamlet from these three perspectives, with special attention given to the degree of hybridity in their translations. Conclusions come out as follows: as the two versions are produced in different ages, the overall degree of hybridity in the later version is evidently higher than that in the earlier version; the conveyance of the Shakespearean style, connotation and flavor is also better rendered in the later version; as to the over-Europeanization of Zhu's version at the level of linguistics, the degree of hybridity in the later version is lowered more or less so as to conform to the linguistic or grammatical norms of Chinese and the acceptability of target readers, which rightly proves the statement that the degree of hybridity should be appropriate. From this fact we can draw important implications for the practice of translation. Moreover, the findings of regular improvements in later versions from the perspective of hybridity also provide theoretical support for the practice of retranslation of classic works.