Lin Shu's Translation of Shakespeare's Religious Motifs in Twentieth-Century China

2017 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 389-404
Author(s):  
Jenny Wong

When Christian values fall into the hands of translators, how are these Christian values represented in a non-religious or areligious target culture? How do the translations reflect the conflicting ideologies of the time and of the individual translators? This article will examine Lin Shu's major translations of The Merchant of Venice in early twentieth-century China, an important period when reform of Confucianism encountered imported Western ideals. Close textual analysis of the translation produced by Lin Shu, a Confucian literatus and a reformist, reveals that religious content in English literary works was manipulated, Christian references often being omitted or adapted. This study illustrates the translator's strategies, picking and choosing what to domesticate in the translated work to suit his ideology, and how a society's expectations and ideologies shape the translation product. The analysis offers some perspectives for understanding how the translator's linguistic and religious roles and ideologies shaped the Chinese Shakespeare, and how the religious values were re-presented in early twentieth-century China.

2012 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-158
Author(s):  
Vojko Gorjanc

This article discusses how linguistic and translation norms, as evident in dictionaries, enforce the ideology of heteronormativity in Slovenia. The aim of this paper is to show how translation norms concerning homoeroticism were shaped in the translation of classical literature in Slovenia in the twentieth century. Translation norms are shaped in a certain period of time and in a certain environment among translators and others involved in translation according to social and cultural circumstances, expectations, and adaptations of topics to these expectations, in which the translation contrasts the initial norms with the norms of the target culture. At the same time, the linguistic norms of the standard language are created as a result of speakers’ continuous adaptation to a social and cultural environment, as a result of adapting to the current social ideal. It is assumed that translations contributed to creating a model of heteronormativity, which continues to characterize the Slovenian community today because of the limited number of new translations of classical works of literature. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of evidence of homosexuality in Slovenian translations of Shakespeare’sThe Merchant of Venice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahar Gürsel

Abstract Willard D. Straight – architect, diplomat, photographer, publisher, sketcher, and writer – arrived in Korea in 1904 as a correspondent during the Russo-Japanese War, and became the US vice consul in Seoul in 1905. By utilizing a number of images from the Willard Dickerman Straight Papers of Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and by referring to other relevant sources of/about Straight, this essay presents a textual analysis and comprehensive visual reading about the country which Straight observed in a very crucial transition period in global history. It provides a glimpse at the perspective of an early twentieth-century American diplomat, eyewitness, photographer, and writer on the cultural, industrial, and technological transformations that Korea experienced in the early 1900s as a consequence of its interaction with major world powers.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 134-142
Author(s):  
Esther B. Schupak

Abstract Because of its potential for fostering antisemitic stereotypes, in the twentieth century The Merchant of Venice has a history of being subject to censorship in secondary schools in the United States. While in the past it has often been argued that the play can be used to teach tolerance and to fight societal evils such as xenophobia, racism and antisemitism, I argue that this is no longer the case due to the proliferation of performance methods in the classroom, and the resultant emphasis on watching film and stage productions. Because images – particularly film images – carry such strong emotional valence, they have the capacity to subsume other pedagogical aspects of this drama in their emotional power and memorability. I therefore question whether the debate over teaching this play is truly a question of ‘censorship’, or simply educational choice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Xiu Gao

In the Western world, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is controversial due to its stereotypical description of Jews as evil and greedy. In China, the work was not widely known until its translations came out. This article deals with two Chinese renderings of Shakespeare’s classic, by Laura White (1914–1915) and Shiqiu Liang (2001/1936) respectively, which reconstruct the image of Shylock and Jews on the basis of the translators’ perceptions of the original figure, combining their identities and social backgrounds. In imagology, based on the ideas of Pageaux (1989/1994), the image of the ‘other’ can be analysed on three levels: lexical items, larger textual units, and plot. On the face of it, the image of the ‘other’ in translation can originate in either the source or target culture. However, the present article, which focuses on the lexical level, shows that there is a third possibility – a lexicon that blends two or more cultures.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Abson

This chapter summarises the classic theories of leadership. The reader will note the similarities that exist within this area of leadership studies – these theories all focus on the individual leader, and view leadership as a specialised role. In these classic approaches to leadership, leadership is something someone ‘does’, and the focus is solely on the formal leader and their personality characteristics or their attributes. These approaches are now sometimes referred to as entity leadership because leadership is the sole preserve of the entity or individual, and that individual is highly influential. These theories of leadership began to emerge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and whilst they are now between 50 and 100 years old, it is important to explore them briefly, as they form the basis from which leadership studies first emerged.


Author(s):  
Andrea Bachner

This chapter analyzes the use of inscriptive metaphors in trauma theories, from Freud’s psychoanalytical models of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to contemporary theorists such as Agamben, Caruth, Hirsch, and Lyotard. As an unregistered shock that continues to haunt the individual, trauma is an inscription whose impact leaves no trace. Accordingly, the inscriptive metaphors deployed in theories of trauma tend to multiply since they are caught in the dilemma of representing trauma without sacrificing a definition of trauma as the unrepresentable par excellence. For a thorough analysis of the ways in which trauma turns inscriptive, this chapter zooms in on a scandalous counterpoint: that between the number tattoos of Holocaust victims and the mark of circumcision. Whereas the number tattoo brands and produces a human body as inhuman, but can be rewritten as a corporeal memorial, circumcision can be misconstrued as traumatic mark, as a supplement to castration, but can also serve as a model for an ethical thought.


2021 ◽  
Vol 66 (2) ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
А. А Romanov . ◽  
◽  
K.K Zhampeissova ◽  

The article shows the stages of life of the outstanding teacher, psychologist, scientist and educator A.P.Nechaev, exiled to Kazakhstan. describing the main milestones and dynamics of the formation of experimental pedagogy in the early twentieth century. His name is associated with many innovative methods of scientific research for its time, the priority of the development of syndrome psychology, which laid the basic provisions of differential psychophysiology. The current ideas of the scientist about the integrity of the study and the spiritual and moral development of the individual are highlighted.


Author(s):  
Paolo Amorosa

The introduction sets the historiographical and political stakes of narrating and analyzing Scott’s campaign for the Spanish origin of international law, drawing on current methodological discussions and the role of the concept of equality in our political discourse. It also explains the relation of the book with previous scholarship on Scott and literature on the rise of international legal networks in the Americas in the early twentieth century. Moreover, it elaborates on the reasons for the primarily descriptive style the text adopts and on certain related choices of language. The introduction ends with an outline of the structure of the book and of the individual chapters.


2018 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-212
Author(s):  
Xiu Gao

Abstract In the Western world, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice is controversial due to its stereotypical description of Jews as evil and greedy. In China, the work was not widely known until its translations came out. This article deals with two Chinese renderings of Shakespeare’s classic, by Laura White (1914–1915) and Shiqiu Liang (2001/1936) respectively, which reconstruct the image of Shylock and Jews on the basis of the translators’ perceptions of the original figure, combining their identities and social backgrounds. In imagology, based on the ideas of Pageaux (1989/1994), the image of the ‘other’ can be analysed on three levels: lexical items, larger textual units, and plot. On the face of it, the image of the ‘other’ in translation can originate in either the source or target culture. However, the present article, which focuses on the lexical level, shows that there is a third possibility – a lexicon that blends two or more cultures.


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