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This article reviews Using Computers in the Translation of Literary Style: Challenges and Opportunities

This conversation, which took place in the summer of 2020, traces 25 years of publishing The Translator, from its inception and early days, to its establishment as a leading international publicati...

At first sight, it may seem odd for this Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s Language to include a chapter on Shakespeare’s language and translation. After all, a translation renders a text into another language; inasmuch as a translation of Shakespeare is a real translation, it will no longer be in Shakespeare’s language.

Building on the growing interest among Translation Studies scholars in ‘intralingual translation’ and hoping to contribute to it by some data-driven descriptive work, this paper sets out to investigate the specific case of rewritings of Shakespeare in modern English. Examples will be taken from Romeo and Juliet (c. 1595), a play for which more than a dozen such versions have been found. These are born from a perceived need to bridge the comprehension gap between Shakespeare’s play and later audiences. The paper will look into the nature of this comprehension gap and the various (other) ways of dealing with it, before comparing the corpus of modernized versions of Romeo and Juliet. A great variety of translational approaches emerges from the study, and there is no less variety as to how these rewritings appear to be labelled or classified, suggesting that they belong in a generic no-man’s land. The idea of translating Shakespeare into modern English generally invites negative reactions; the main arguments used in these controversies and their underlying political and cultural assumptions are also briefly examined.

The article opens by outlining a multidimensional definition of wordplay, designed to do justice to the “dynamic” nature of this complex field of phenomena. Of these various dimensions, the “communicative significance” of wordplay is the main focus of the present analysis, which investigates the wordplay in two recent English-language novels: My Sister, My Love (2008) by Joyce Carol Oates and A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (2007) by Xiaolu Guo. The latter may be described as a “global novel”. It turns out to offer different wordplay readings to different readerships, depending on their cultural background and multilingual literacies. Like Guo’s novel, Oates’s My Sister, My Love abounds in wordplay, much of it of the malapropian variety, too, and with an equally elusive quality about it. However, Oates’s novel, which is more firmly rooted in a single culture, also shows a complex multi-voiced postmodern narrative style which endows its wordplay with an elusiveness of a very different kind. Its readerships are likely to be linguistically and culturally more homogeneous but these readers will not always quite know to which character or narrative voice in this novel with its various levels of discursive embedding the wordplays and malapropisms have to be attributed. The corpus analysed is far too small to permit generalisation but the “global” and the “postmodern” qualities of the respective novels invite extrapolations and comparison with wider corpora. The discussion demonstrates the absolute need for dynamic approaches to wordplay in the novel no less than in other genres or speech situations.

Borrowing from two iconic stories, Romeo and Juliet and West Side Story, this article acknowledges that adaptation lies at the centre of the play today as much as it did in the mid-1590s. It argues that stage productions approach it in a manner similar to Shakespeare’s, who took a story familiar to his contemporaries and “repeat[ed] it but without replication” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013, 173). Making the case for a broader study on the region, my chapter begins with a flashback to the story’s arrival in the eastern part of Europe and fast-forwards to its current state of affairs, offering a ‘note’ on Romania. In doing so, it argues that the popularity of Romeo and Juliet in the West has been matched by that in the rest of Europe, where it has proliferated in a plurality of, often, co-existing forms.

Nothing like wordplay can make difference between languages look so uncompromising, can give such a sharp edge to the dilemma between forms and effects, can so blur the line between translation and adaptation, or can cast such harsh light on our illusion of complete semantic stability. In the pun the whole language system may resonate, and so may literary traditions and ideological discourses. It follows that the pun does not only put translators to the test, it also poses a challenge to the views and concepts of those who study translation. This book brings together experts on translation and the pun, as well as researchers representing a variety of other relevant disciplines and schools of thought, ranging from theology to deconstruction and from contrastive linguistics to feminism. It can be read as a companion volume to Wordplay and Translation, a special issue of The Translator (Volume 2, Number 2, 1996), also edited by Dirk Delabastita

1. Contributors 2. Introduction 3. 'If but as well I other accents borrow, that can my speech diffuse': Multilingual perspectives on English Renaissance drama (by Delabastita, Dirk) 4. Articles 5. Reading Early Modern literature through OED3: The loan word (by Goodland, Giles) 6. Neighbor Hob and neighbor Lob: English dialect speakers on the Tudor stage (by Simon-Jones, Lindsey Marie) 7. 'Fause Frenche Enough': Kate's French in Shakespeare's Henry V (by Crunelle-Vanrigh, Anny) 8. Female multilingualism in William Shakespeare and George Peele (by Keinanen, Nely) 9. 'Have you the tongues?': Translation, multilingualism and intercultural contact in The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Love's Labour's Lost (by Oakley-Brown, Liz) 10. Social stratification and stylistic choices in Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday (by Auer, Anita) 11. Refashioning language in Richard Brome's theatre: Comic multilingualism in action (by Paravano, Cristina) 12. Interlinguicity and The Alchemist (by Saenger, Michael) 13. Afterword 14. Double tongues (by Montgomery, Marianne) 15. Index