The localisation of William Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew In Georg Meri’s Estonian translation

Abstract

This thesis analyses the Estonian translation of William Shakespeare’s (1564–1616) play Taming of the Shrew by Georg Meri, focusing on the translation of idioms and proverbs, colloquialisms, and cultural nuances. The aim of this study is to highlight the challenges of translating Shakespeare for local audiences, as well as bringing a spotlight onto the role of the translator and the proficiency needed for translating, and challenging the critique of Meri’s translation being ‘bookish’. The analysis looks at various scenes of the play and identifies the translation techniques used, as well as looking at the performability of the scenes. The thesis consists of an introduction that gives an overview of the primary texts and defines the term ‘localisation’, followed by a theoretical background section, which introduces the translation techniques and models, discusses challenges of theatre translation, conceptualizes the focus of the thesis, looks at different opinions on performability, and finally identifies the gap in research. The analysis section includes an analysis of the vocabulary in different scenes, and a discussion of the techniques and performability of the translations. The thesis concludes with the conclusions section, where the analysis results are given. Key words: William Shakespeare, Georg Meri, theatre translation, translation studies, Taming of the Shrew.