A Quantitative Analysis of the Romanian Translations of Shakespeare’s Bawdy Puns

Anca-Simina Martin

doi:10.24193/mjcst.2020.10.04

Abstract

This article proposes a quantitative analysis of the Romanian translations of 325 ribald Shakespearean puns, which originate in 20 plays and 71 renditions, with special focus on assessing the impact of translator-subjective and objective factors on the rendition process in the pre-communist, communist, and post-communist periods. The findings invalidate several widespread beliefs: Dragoș Protopopescu’s renditions, banned by the communist regime for their ‘modernizing’ approach to the Shakespearean text, bowdlerized more bawdy puns than ‘ESPLA’, which replaced it as the Party-approved Romanian edition of the dramatist’s plays; Adolphe Stern’s translations, harshly criticized in his period, fare better in terms of ribald pun rendition than Scarlat Ghica’s and Dimitrie Ghica’s, hailed as the most successful of their time; modern translations of Shakespeare display a heterogeneous distribution of target-text puns across the surveyed rendition strategies, despite enjoying similar availability of and access to pun translation studies.

Highlights

THE ROMANIAN TRANSLATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY PUNS studies such as Magdalena Krawiec’s (2017) analysis of the frequency of pun rendition strategies in the Polish translations of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the quantitative approach to the playwright’s puns and ribald language-play in particular is hardly a popular avenue of research among scholars of Shakespeare translation, with the relevance-theoretic approach proposed by Francisco Díaz-Pérez (2013) constituting the most widely used framework in Shakespearean translation studies
This article proposes a quantitative analysis of the translation of 325 unanimously accepted ribald puns originating in 20 Shakespearean plays and 71 Romanian renditions, with special focus on assessing the impact of translator-subjective and objective factors on the translation of the dramatist’s bawdy wordplay in the pre-communist, communist, and post-communist eras
A set of legitimate questions arise: if his analysis includes puns, what does sense-for-sense imply in that case? If some words lose their ribald connotations, does this indicate that those instances of bawdy constitute plays on two meanings, ribald and non-ribald, of the same word? the results of his statistical inquiry are provocative: according to Volceanov, 70% of the surveyed sample was rendered effectively into Romanian, yet to what extent is this the outcome of a methodology-based research or the empiric estimations of a Shakespeare translator? My thesis is that only a survey based on a quantitative studies-oriented framework can answer this question

Summary

Introduction

THE ROMANIAN TRANSLATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S BAWDY PUNS studies such as Magdalena Krawiec’s (2017) analysis of the frequency of pun rendition strategies in the Polish translations of Love’s Labour’s Lost, the quantitative approach to the playwright’s puns and ribald language-play in particular is hardly a popular avenue of research among scholars of Shakespeare translation, with the relevance-theoretic approach proposed by Francisco Díaz-Pérez (2013) constituting the most widely used framework in Shakespearean translation studies.

Results

Conclusion