Translating George Bernard Shaw, a linguistic and cultural challenge

Abstract

George Bernard Shaw, playwright and theatre critic, was an outstanding
but also highly controversial figure. In his role as critic, writing for The Saturday Review, he exposed and condemned the weaknesses of Victorian drama, full of melodramatic, biased ideas, typical of the English bourgeois mentality of his time. He was concerned, not only with drama but mostly with the attitude of a hypocritical society. Rosalie Rahal Haddad’s book Shaw, O Crítico/Shaw, the Critic (2009), presents what Shaw understood as good theater and comments on some of his critical texts that show how his ideas prevail and are still applicable today. In this work we intend to show, first, the difficulties met while translating from both Portuguese and late 19th century English and the decisions made by the translators. Secondly, we aim at referring to the process of negotiation of meanings (Eco 2008) and the linguistic and cultural revision resulting from the initial phase of translation, which is understood as a multidimensional process that includes the acts of reading and re-reading, as well as interpreting, based on context of production and reception, creating a text in another language, and finally revising, before coming out with the translated version.