Translating And Rewriting

William Shakespeare is one of the greatest dramatists in the world . "The works of William Shakespeare are a great landmark in the history of world literature." (Wu Weiren 1997:75) And furthermore the tragedies are the most famous among his plays . Romeo and Juliet, like many of his other works . has been translated into many kinds of languages all over the world . In China, several translating versions have been found, and in this thesis three versions of Romeo and Juliet are selected: Mr. Cao Yu's version, Mr. Zhu Shenghao's version and Mr. Liang Shiqiu's version . With the rise of the Western School of Translation Studies, Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory provides us with a theoretical framework to compare and value several translators and their translating versions of an original text. It introduces a set of factors to better analyze the influence of the extra literary upon literary translation, of which the most important ones are poetics, ideology and patronage.This thesis will apply Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory to the study of the comparison of three Chinese versions of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, and that of how poetics, ideology and patronage influence the translation activities, and thereby quite different stylistic versions are produced. The author tries not to traditionally categorize these versions into faithfulness or unfaithfulness, superiority or inferiority, but to affirm the rationality and necessity through detailed comparison of the unique translation mode among three different Chinese versions of Zhu Shenghao, Liang...