PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
  Monday, 18 September 2006
  7 Replies
  7.6K Visits
16 years ago
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#1340
How much of Shakespeare gets lost in (any) translation? :?
16 years ago
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#1341
How much of Shakespeare gets lost in (any) translation? :?


Taking into consideration the changes in the English Language and culture since Shakespeare's time, we ALL encounter Shakespeare in translation.
It depends on the translator. I speak several languages and I like to compare these things once in a while. Some may go for a very literal translation, some go for a poetic translation. Some try to preserve the iambic pentameters, some don't. Some translations have really intrigued me with how creative and "in the spirit" they are and some have appalled me. There's a wide range of results.
16 years ago
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#1343
I think *a lot* of Shakespeare's double-meanings are invariably lost when he is translated into another language. Both because it is incredibly difficult for the translater to retain all the meanings, and because the translater probably isn't even aware of all the meanings. Many of the meanings are even subject to interpretation, so there will be an interpretative element in any translation.

The most impressive translation I have seen is V. Østerberg's Danish translation of the Sonnets from 1944, which, on the face of it, comes astonishingly close to exhibiting the same complexity of signification as the originals. Going deeper, however, insufficiencies do begin to show...
16 years ago
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#1344
Please forgive my ignorance in this matter, and please correct me if I err, but it seems to me, (love that phrase) any translation of literature, especially poetry runs the risk of losing the sounds vocalized by the reader as intended by the author - such as most obviously alliteration, assonance, and rhyme. Plus there must be idiomatic, dialectical, and metaphorical speech and allusions specific to the original language that can be lost or seriously mangled.

Regards, Charles
16 years ago
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#1345
Why, right, you are i'th' right! :-)
16 years ago
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#1346
.. runs the risk of losing the sounds vocalized by the reader as intended by the author


Which is part of my point - Elizabethan, dare I say 'Stratfordian' English sounded very different from today's Englishes.

Which is true to Shakespeare? - Certainly not the RP so beloved of many - and Australian, in several elements is closer than modern UK Midlands.

And we need to remember we are translating a play - so much of the final performance is interpretation and 'translation' for a modern audience anyway that closeness of the words to the original is almost irrelevant.

This is such that a badly translated text , with the right audience, can be closer to the 'original' (whatever that means) than an excellent translation - or even the original itself.

I guarantee a bunch of Romanian shepherds would have a far better understanding of Titania's speech about the weather - if it was given in straight Romanian - than any group of IvoryTowerers bunched around the original manuscript.
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