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

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.