Shakespeare’s Bawdy Wordplay In China

Shakespeare is an outstanding playwright well known for his masterful use of English language. An eminent feature of his writing is his abundant use of bawdy wordplay. Beyond the English world, however, Shakespeare’s plays are read and performed mainly in translation. How to reproduce features of his writing may pose challenges for translators. An investigation into Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays could reveal how certain feature of Shakespeare’s writing are reproduced in a different linguistic and cultural context.From the perspective of bawdy wordplay translation, the thesis conducts a case study on the basis of three Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, to analyze translation modes adopted by the three translators in rendering bawdy wordplays in Shakespeare’s plays and explain the factors influencing their decisions.The review of previous studies on Shakespeare’s bawdy language in its source and target cultural contexts indicates a sharp contrast between the abundant literature of western scholarship and the limitation of literature of Chinese scholarship in this field. The review of studies on wordplay translation indicates a confusion regarding the definitions and terminologies of wordplay and the prescriptive trend in definitions of wordplay and in studies on wordplay translation. Different from the prescriptive vein in previous studies on wordplay translation, Delabastita’s study of wordplay translation endeavored to describe all the possibilities of how wordplay could be translated versus the actual decisions made by translators in dealing with wordplay, and explain the possible influencing factors behind these decisions. Thus, Delabastita’s framework of wordplay translation could be borrowed for descriptive studies of wordplay translation to fill in the gap. Finally, the literature on bawdy wordplay translation in Romeo and Juliet exposes a lack of in-depth empirical studies on this topic.By the case study of three Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the thesis comes to the following findings.Firstly, there are eleven possible translation modes at the disposal of translators as they translate bawdy wordplay:namely, bawdy pun> bawdy pun, bawdy pun> innocent pun, bawdy pun> bawdy punoid, bawdy pun> innocent punoid, bawdy pun> non-selective non-pun, bawdy pun> innocent only non-pun, bawdy pun> zero, direct copy, creating bawdy pun, and editorial techniques. Among the eleven possible modes of translation, bawdy pun> innocent-only non-pun is the most prevalent mode of translating bawdy wordplay for all three translators, followed by bawdy pun> bawdy pun and bawdy pun> zero and direct copy and creating of bawdy pun are extremely rare in three translations. An overall tendency of positive attitudes toward neither the bawdy elements nor the form of wordplay can be observed.Secondly, a comparison drawn among the three versions demonstrates that Zhu ranks the highest in the chances of adopting the mode of bawdy pun> zero, and the last in the chances of adopting bawdy pun> bawdy pun, which points to his negative attitude to bawdiness as well as wordplay as a form containing bawdy elements, despite occasional exceptions. Liang ranks the highest in bawdy pun> non-selective, which, along with his relative high chances of adopting bawdy pun> bawdy pun mode, indicates his positive attitude to allow for bawdiness in the target text and some degree of positive attitude to translating the form of wordplay. Fang ranks the highest in adopting the mode of bawdy pun> bawdy pun, which indicates his positive attitude to handling sexual subtexts and the form of wordplay.At last, by analyzing the possible structural and agency factors influencing translators’decision, the author proposes linguistic context, cultural and social contexts, ideological context and translational norms as structural factors and the translator’s motivation of translation and their personal background as agency factors acting on their decisions. Among them, linguistic context exerts both positive and negative influence to their handling of the form of wordplay, while cultural, social and ideological contexts mainly exert negative influence to their handling of bawdy elements. Translational norms influence each translator to a different degree, leading to the heterogeneity in their frequencies of translation modes. The differences in translators’motivation of translation and their pertinent personal background, such as their age and experience, account for the difference between Zhu’s negative attitude and Liang’s and Fang’s positive attitude toward bawdy wordplay.The thesis aims to reveal how bawdy wordplays in Shakespeare’s plays could be translated and how they are actually dealt with by different translators and offer rational explications for their translational decisions, so as to shed lights on topics such as the translation of sexually suggestive language in a different linguistic and cultural context, and the structural and agency factors governing such translational phenomena and offer some insights for future retranslation of Shakespeare’s plays in China.