Description
The Winter’s Tale: Shaping the characters in translation (Iokasti-Rigopoula Stagaki)
The study examines two Greek target versions (1952, 2004) of Shakespeare’s latest plays The Winter’s Tale, (1611). The plot escalates quickly, in the first part of the play, which is a tragedy, with the second part being a comedy. The study examines how im/politeness changes perception of the characters in the two versions: male characters vary in the way they are constructed in terms of values like friendship, and vices like jealousy, while themes such as female submissiveness and gender relations also display intra-cultural variation. Analysis of samples of naturalistic data show variation in the way certain characters are constructed in the two versions, which is confirmed by experimental data elicited by a questionnaire addressing 13 bilingual respondents. The significance of the research lies in that pragmatics may provide a basis for the study of characters in a play and in that translation is a rich resource for this.
