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RAN translation in QUESTION

Translation in Question

The room is dark except for the blue light hitting the viewing screen; all of a sudden the screen is filled with scenes of mountain sides and a vast wilderness of green. Then the word RAN, alongside its Chinese character equivalent meaning chaos, insurrection, etc. appears in bold blood red. RAN, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, clearly was made for a Japanese audience in mind. The changes that Akira Kurosawa makes from King Lear, to his film RAN, are what allow his audience to relate with the foreign text. As Lawrence Venuti claims in his book: The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Difference,. “Translation forms domestic subjects by enabling a process of “mirroring or self-recognition: the foreign text becomes intelligible when the reader recognizes himself or herself in translation by identifying the domestic values…” (venuti77) Clearly, RAN exemplifies how a translator can domesticate a text and make it successful for a par...

Posted by: Melissa T. Littlefield

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