TRANSLATORS’ INTERPRETATIONS OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS IN THE LIGHT OF INFORMATION ENTROPY

Abstract

The article substantiates the problem of translators’ interpretations of information entropy cases in time-remote original texts on the example of William Shakespeare’s plays in the process of translators’ creative reproduction of the original works in the target language. The purpose of the article is to identify the factors that determine the difference in translators’ interpretations and their manifestations in chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st centuries. The tasks of the research are the following: to describe the theoretical basis of the research by determining the specifics of translator’s interpretation and the phenomenon of information entropy from the standpoint of translation theory and practice; to show the influence of different extralingual factors on the process and result of Ukrainian retranslations. The research material is taken from Shakespeare’s tragedies “Romeo and Juliet” (1594) and “Hamlet, Prince of Denmark” (1600), which serve as samples of Early Modern English at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, and their chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st centuries. The research methodology incorporates not only general scientific methods, as well as empirical methods in order to substantiate the theoretical basis of the research, but also methods of discourse analysis (cultural and historical, comparative-linguistic-cultural), methods of literary analysis (biographical, hermeneutic, interpretive-textual), methods of linguistic analysis (etymological, contextual, descriptive, semantic, and stylistic) and methods of contrastive translation and transformational analysis, which are used to determine the changes in the scope of information expressed by the units of analysis in the timeremote original texts and in chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th – 21st centuries. The article argues that the difference in translators’ interpretations and, consequently, the variety of retranslations are taken into account by different objective and subjective extralingual factors that influence the process and result of retranslations in cases of information entropy. The objective factors are the historically different social and cultural contexts in which the original texts of the 16th–17th centuries and their chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations of the 19th–21st centuries are created; the literary trends dominating at the corresponding epochs that influence the author’s and translators’ artistic styles. The subjective factors are translators’ creative personalities that reflect their perception of the surrounding world and personal worldviews determined by their different life experience and social background. Objective and subjective factors, which cause different interpretations of information entropy cases in the time-remote original text and presentation of different scope of information in chronologically distant Ukrainian retranslations, are interrelated and interdependent. If all the factors are the same, i.e. the translators belong to one and the same historical period of time, adhere to the same literary trend and have the same cultural and social background, the translators’ interpretations coincide. At least one of the factors being different, the translators’ interpretations of information entropy cases differ which is a prerequisite for the diachronic plurality in translation of time-remote Shakespeare’s tragedies by Ukrainian translators of the 19th–21st centuries.