Liang Shiqiu Research Articles

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

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

Warm, Light Smile, Timeless Humanity

The series of essays of "Yasha's Sketches" is a treasure among modern scholars' sketches. This paper pays special attention to the author Liang Shiqiu's life and thought trajectory, and explores and evaluates the motives for the creation of the collection, the humor and writing style, as well as the creative proposition of the collection, starting from the three aspects of style, writing style, and literary concept. Liang Shiqiu's attitude of life, which shifted from entering the world to exiting the world, prompted him to start composing small essays; the humor presented in the anthology by using a variety of techniques can be classified into three kinds, namely, laughter, bitter laughter, and ridicule, and Liang's humor is different from Lu Xun's and Qian Zhongshu's because of its warmth and generosity; and the "fixed and universal human nature" is the unifying theme of the anthology. Liang's humor" is the unifying theme of the anthology, which also influences the creation of later generations of literature.

음식과 문화적 기억

Taiwan's dietary literature has continued to develop qualitatively and quantitatively in the late 1990s and now has a solid status in Taiwanese literature. Dietary prose, which accounts for a large proportion of dietary literature, began to form its writer base in the 1970s. Representative writers include the first generation Liang Shiqiu(梁實秋, 1903-1987) and Tang Lusun(唐魯孫, 1907-1985), the second generation Lu Yaodong(逯耀東, 1933-2006), and the third generation Jiao Tong(焦桐, 1956-). While the first generation artists expressed their longing for their hometown through food, the second generation artists added historical elements to add social and cultural contexts. And the third generation writers is characterized by using various materials and styles. This paper examined the dietary prose of the second generation, Lu Yaodong, and analyzed the cultural identity of the 1.5th generation of mainlanders(外省人) and his writing as historians in his work. Lu Yaodong witnessed the rapidly changing values and ways of life of the ethnic community in modern society and projected his desire to preserve tradition in his dietary prose. He used historical knowledge and literary sensibility to capture the history and personal memories of dietary culture in his works. Through this, Lu Yaodong tried to strengthen the cultural identity of the Chinese people by recording cultural memories of dietary culture and passing them down to posterity.

A Corpus-based Study of Personal Pronouns in Shakespeare's Plays

Based on corpus comparative analysis of Shakespeare’s plays Zhu Shenghao and Liang Shiqiu’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays in terms of personal pronouns. The analysis reveals that Liang Shiqiu chooses more explicit personal pronouns, while Zhu Shenghao pays more attention to the divine rhythm of the translation. Compared with the two translations, the use of personal pronouns in Liang Shiqiu’s translation is more frequent. Thereby analyzing the influencing factors of this phenomenon, the study shows that the differences between Chinese and English languages, the subjectivity of translators and social factors affect the explicit pronouns in translation and variation.

The creativity and limitations of AI neural machine translation

Abstract This study examines the performance of the neural machine translation system DeepL in translating Shakespeare’s plays Coriolanus and The Merchant of Venice. The aim here is to explore the strengths and limitations of an AI-based English-Chinese translation of literary texts. Adopting a corpus-based approach, the study investigates the accuracy and fluency rates, the linguistic features, and the use of various methods of translation in the Chinese translations of Shakespeare’s plays conducted via DeepL. It compares these to the translations by Liang Shiqiu, a well-known Chinese translator. The study finds that DeepL performs well in translating these works, with an accuracy and fluency rate of above 80% in sampled texts, showing the potential of the use of neural machine translation in translating literary texts across distant languages. Our research further reveals that the DeepL translations exhibit a certain degree of creativity in their use of translation methods such as addition, explicitation, conversion and shift of perspective, and in the use of Chinese sentence-final modal particles, as well as Chinese modal verbs. On the other hand, the system appears to be limited in that a certain amount of translation errors are present, including literal translations.

A Corpus-Based Study of the Chinese Translation of Color Metaphors in Shakespeare’s Plays

Metaphor is a fundamental cognitive concept and this study utilizes a corpus-based approach to explore the vibrant color metaphors used in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as the Chinese translations of these metaphors by Liang Shiqiu, Zhu Shenghao, and Fang Ping. The primary focus of this analysis is on the translation methods and strategies employed by these three translators, with an emphasis on how they transfer the form, content (i.e., function), and meaning of the color metaphors into Chinese. Both rhetoric and conceptual metaphors are examined to provide insight into the translation practice of these three individuals. It found that there exists a significant similarity among the three translators in literally translating a majority of the color metaphors in Shakespeare’s plays; however, distinct differences emerge in their adoption of de-metaphorization while translating nonconforming color metaphors. Three major factors are discussed to account for the similarities and differences in translating color metaphors: (1) the shared cultural experiential sources for the color metaphors in English and Chinese cultures; (2) the universality of metaphorical thinking among people from different cultural backgrounds; (3) the skopos (purpose) of the three translators in translating Shakespeare’s plays during various historical periods. This study has significant implications for global corpus-based drama studies and metaphor studies, as well as corpus translation studies.

Milton in China

Milton in China

Review of Bai (2022): Mapping the Translator: A Study of Liang Shiqiu

Review of Bai (2022): Mapping the Translator: A Study of Liang Shiqiu

On the Performability of Drama Translation: A Case Study of Zhu Shenghao’s and Liang Shiqiu’s Versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Drama translation, as a part of visual art, is more than just textual translation; it is a component of dramatic performance portrayed in the form of verbal action. Lines in drama translation are thus dialogues that render the drama performance rather than descriptive languages that provide information. Translators must use a variety of translation strategies to achieve performability in drama translation. Following Levý’s (2011) translation theory, the paper conducts a contrastive analysis of Zhu Shenghao’s and Liang Shiqiu’s Chinese versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream from the aspects of the acquisition of speakability and intelligibility, restoration of semantic contexts, reflection of verbal action, and achievement of characterisation, exploring how the performability is satisfied in drama translation, and summarising strategies for fulfilling performability in drama translation. It is discovered that Zhu Shenghao (Zhu) insisted on his principles for drama translation, placed emphasis on performability in his translation, and used the following strategies to achieve performability in his translation: using colloquial style language, adjusting the order of sentence segments, reconstructing the syntax, uncovering the indeterminacy for different contexts, using modal particles, using dialects of the target language, and revealing characters’ intentions. However, in order to achieve speakability and intelligibility, Zhu abandoned the stichomythia rhyme, failing to present the verbal action. On the other hand, Liang preserved the stichomythia rhyme, reflecting the verbal action. Furthermore, Zhu replaced the personal pronoun in the original text with notional terms, resulting in the loss of semantic contexts, whereas Liang Shiqiu (Liang) preserved the personal pronoun, restoring the semantic contexts.

Faith and Meaning: A Study of the Chinese Translation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by Liang Shiqiu from the Perspective of Topology

Faith and Meaning: A Study of the Chinese Translation of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream by Liang Shiqiu from the Perspective of Topology

량스추(梁實秋)의 『셰익스피어 전집』 번역 의미에 관한 연구

This paper tries to discuss what kind of translation values Liang Shiqiu used to translate Shakespeare’s Complete Works. This study finds that Liang Shiqiu’s Shakespeare’s Complete Works is an example of a vibrant and accessible literary translation, exhibits many developments in translation methods, and is a great example of Chinese translation history. He worked on translation with the belief that various personalities in Shakespeare’s literature created a powerful psychological insight into the human condition. To this end, he carefully analyzed the original text before translating, and found ways to improve its fidelity and readability. He paid attention to the original artistry of the drama, and tried to preserve the structure of the original as much as possible, so that readers could experience a text that is similar to the original. He also attempted to promote the development of modern Chinese literature by absorbing new ideas, vocabulary, and idioms into his translation practices. This paper reveals how, in doing so, he firstly implicitly recognized the culture of foreign countries by translating familiar images that would reflect the social customs of foreign countries or the psychology or emotions of the people. Second, he improved readers’ understanding by annotating background knowledge on idioms or shapes with complex cultural implications. Third, he showed the characteristics of a so-called “Europeanized translation” methodology, in which exact phrase formats in the original text are replicated. Fourth, he enhanced the connotation and elegance of Shakespeare’s sentences with a classical translation that demonstrates the advantages of traditional Chinese characters.

Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

Mapping Modern Beijing: Space, Emotion, Literary Topography

Chinese Translation of Modal Verb Shall in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure

Modal verbs are a type of verbs which express meanings such as volition, ability, possibility, necessity, etc. In Shakespeare’s plays, modal verbs are characterized by their large numbers and rich meanings, with some of their meanings different from their present-day English descendants. For instance, shall has the meaning “order to”, besides “intend to”, “ought to”, “be to”. This paper focuses on the differences among the Chinese translations of SHALL in Measure for Measure, by Zhu Shenghao, Liang Shiqiu, Fang Ping, Ying Ruocheng, and Peng Jingxi, its aim being to find out SHALL’s exact meanings and appropriate ways to render them in Chinese. The result shows that SHALL in Measure for Measure appears 86 times with 4 different meanings, which are “intend to”, “ought to”, “order to”, “be to”. Liang Shiqiu and Peng Jingxi tended to adopt formal equivalence in their translations, and Zhu Shenghao, Fang Ping and Ying Ruocheng tended to adopt functional equivalence in their translations.

The translation of sex-related content in Peter Pan in China

ABSTRACTThis article discusses how sex-related content is rendered in three Chinese translations of James Matthew Barrie’s Peter Pan (1911): Liang Shiqiu (1929), Yang Jingyuan (1991), and Ren Rongrong (2011). From the 1920s to the present, several major social and cultural events in China have each had a profound influence on the social environment, the literary climate, and state ideology, with implications for both publishing and translating. This article investigates how Peter Pan’s rich subtext and its readership duality interacted with China’s socio-cultural context at different historical moments, resulting in translations with contrasting textual features. It is found that Liang’s translation is the most tolerant of sex-related content, owing to the relatively liberal socio-cultural environment and relaxed censorship protocol of the 1920s. Ren’s translation is found to be the most conservative version due to its sensitivity to what is expected of translations for children in contemporary China.

The literary critic as translator: a case study on translation and the translator’s literary poetics

This paper investigates the relationship between literary poetics, translation poetics and translation. The translator discussed in this context, Liang Shiqiu, is also a literary critic, and this is thus a case study of the performability of his Chinese translation of Shakespeare. We will discuss two important issues: (1) What is the relationship between the translator’s literary poetics and his translation poetics? (2) To what extent can the translator’s literary poetics exert an influence upon his translation? The study demonstrates that when a translator is also a literary critic, his literary poetics as reflected in his indirect discourse on translation may have a significant influence upon his translation poetics (as reflected in his direct discourse on translation). Also, a translator’s translation poetics in turn can have a direct influence upon the translation (e.g. its performability). The translator’s literary poetics is something internal, which may determine his intention, and thus has a fundamental influence upon the translation.

A Study on Liang Shiqiu’s Romantic Literary Thoughts in the New Culture Movement period

A Study on Liang Shiqiu’s Romantic Literary Thoughts in the New Culture Movement period

A Study on the romance of a classical scholar Liang Shiqiu in his twilight years

A Study on the romance of a classical scholar Liang Shiqiu in his twilight years

A Study of the discussion on translations from Lu Xun and Liang Shi-Qiu

A Study of the discussion on translations from Lu Xun and Liang Shi-Qiu

Translations and rewritings of Hamlet in China

Certain Western classics have become increasingly popular in China, such as two film versions of Hamlet in 2006 alone. This article looks at translations and adaptations of Hamlet in China, several early translations by Tian Han, Shao Ting, and Liang Shiqiu, and then more contemporary adaptations in film and theater, including versions by Lin Zhaohua, Li Guoxiu, Xiong Yuanwei, and Feng Xiaogang. Here, one can see the fruition of Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere’s ideas about translation and rewriting at work, how readers or viewers are more likely to have read or seen adaptations and/or rewritings than the original, and how rewriters and directors insert their own ideas and references to the receiving cultures’ myths and belief systems. Indeed, new definitions of translation and rewriting are needed for the twenty-first century, those that include ideas of reinvention, transformation, and transcreation.

Translator’s Ideology, Dominant Ideology and the Use of Pseudonym

This article seeks to decipher the intricate relationship between translation, the translator’s ideology, the dominant ideology, and the use of pseudonym. It does so through analyzing Liang Shiqiu’s Chinese version of George Orwell’s political satire Animal Farm, written under the pen name of Li Qichun. We will investigate the similarities and differences between Liang’s translations under the pseudonym and the ones written under his real name. In addition, we will explore the conflicts that existed between the translator’s ideology and the dominant ideology of the time when the translation was produced, trying to solve the riddle of why he used the pen name Li Qichun when translating Animal Farm. The study indicates that although there is a similarity between Liang’s translation of Animal Farm under the pen name of Li Qichun and his translation work under his real name, the differences are significant. In terms of the translator’s ideology, Liang was against any form of totalitarianism. The purpose behind translating Animal Farm was to combat totalitarianism, but ironically and paradoxically the society in which the translation was produced was also a totalitarian society. Through reference to the pseudonym we may discover the interactions and conflicts that exist between the translator’s ideology and the dominant ideology of a certain special historical period.