A Comparative Study on the Translation of Character Discourse of Fool in King Lear - Taking Liang Shiqiu's and Zhu Shenghao's Translations as an Example

Abstract

King Lear is one of the four great tragedies written by William Shakespeare, a famous English dramatist and poet in the Renaissance. It is widely regarded as “the greatest play of Shakespeare and the best of his work”. As one of the important and indispensable roles in King Lear, the “Fool” is a clown that appears the most frequently and speaks the most abundant content of all clown characters in the four major tragedies. Though his words are not as many as the contents number of the leading roles in the work, his language features, image and influence are prominent and significant. In the middle of the 19th century, Shakespeare’s works came to China along with the western missionaries and were widely spread in China. And translators in different periods translated Shakespeare’s works based on different historical backgrounds and their own translation styles. Among many famous translators of Shakespeare’s work, Liang Shiqiu and Zhu Shenghao are prominent. Their translations have strong characteristics and representativeness. Liang Shiqiu adhered to the principle of “worship the truth” and respected the original text as much as possible. He mainly adopted the translation strategy of foreignization and wrote in vernacular prose, which was very beautiful and refined. Zhu Shenghao, on the other hand, upheld the theory of “seize the spirit”. He paid attention to readers’ feelings and mainly used domestication translation method with large number of words with Chinese characteristics. Thus, his translation is very idiomatic and vivid. From the perspective of Skopos theory, this paper will make a comparative analysis of the language characteristics of “Fool” in Liang Shiqiu’s and Zhu Shenghao’s translation work, the translation strategies they used and text effects of their works, so as to explore the influence of Skopos theory on translators’ translation and the solutions of translation problems.