Translation of Shakespeare

445 Words2 Pages
A. INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of translation is as old as the tower of Babel.1(Page to Stage, Ortrun Zuber Skerritt, page 3) Translation is generally defined as the action of taking a text and writing it in another language. The fact is translation is not only about writing those texts in other languages, but also writing them in their own languages again and transferring it to other systems such as theatre, musical, cinema etc. As this paper is about translation and translation is concerned with texts, it will be better if the concept of text is told beforehand. Text as Segre says, “Text, deriving from the Latin TEXTUS, 'fabric', develops a metaphor in which the words forming a work are seen, in view of the links that join them, as a weaving. This metaphor, anticipating the observations about the cohesion of a text, hints, in particular, at the content of the text, what is written within a work.”2 Segre is talking about the written texts and words in his definition. But if we summarize it into a single sentence, a text is a coherent set of signs that transmits some kind of informative message. This means that any musical, pictorial, filmic works are considered as texts. Because in these cases, the work is a coherent fabric and the combination of structures that gains meaning together. This paper is concerned about the translation of written words into cinematic signs. This kind of translation is called inter-semiotic translation. In his famous work “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation”, Roman Jakobson defines inter-semiotic translation or transmutation as an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems3. Inter-semiotic translation is largely used in advertising and publicity and is considered to be the hardest kind. What translator needs to deal with in this kind of translation is semiotics and translator should
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