A Cultural Perspective Of Zhu Shenghao's Elegant Rewriting Strategy In Translating Shakespeare

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. And his tragedies are the most famous among all his plays. Romeo and Juliet, like many of his other plays, has been translated into many kinds of languages all over the world. In China, several translating versions have been found, but the most popular and wide-spread one is Zhu Shenghao's version. In this thesis, the author probes into Zhu Shenghao's translation of Romeo and Juliet from the perspective of Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory.With the rise of cultural turn in Western Translation Studies, Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory provides us with a theoretical foundation to value translators and their translations of an original text. This theory introduces a set of factors to better analyze the influence of the extra literary factors upon literary translation, of which the most important ones are poetics, ideology and patronage.This thesis applies Andre Lefevere's rewriting theory to the study of Zhu Shenghao's version of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, clarifying poetics, ideology and patronage influence the translation activities.The thesis consists of three parts. The first part of this thesis is an introduction, in which research questions, the background and significances of the study are stated. The second part of this thesis consists of four chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to rewriting theory. Chapter Two includes a brief introduction to Zhu Shenghao and Shakespeare, and the text as well. In this chapter, the author focuses on the elegant rewritings in Zhu Shenghao's version. Chapter Three analyzes the poetics, ideology of Zhu Shenghao's time and the patronage of him, and how these three factors influence the translator's activity. Based on the researches made in the foregoing chapters, Chapter Four makes a comprehensive assessment of Zhu Shenghao's elegant rewriting strategy, including his contributions and limitations.