merrysa arbet`s blog

These are general directions for beginning to translate one of Shakespeare's plays into modern language and/or a modern setting. This includes choosing a play, deciding how to translate it, and how to start work on the project. The rewriting bit is up to you.

edit Steps

1.
1
Decide which play you want to translate. This could be more difficult than it sounds. You need to like this play a *lot*, because you're going to be rewriting it and that means you're going to be *reading* it over and over and over again - word by word, line by line.
2.
2
Read the whole play through at least twice so you understand the setting and the characters. If you don't understand who they are and why they're doing the things they're doing, you're not going to be able to translate with any degree of success and your finished product won't be recognizable as an 'updated' version of the original.
3.
3
Familiarize yourself with Elizabethan vernacular and slang. You don't have to be exhaustive about this. There are books, and if you ask at the library they'll show you where to find them. Or you can look on the Web by running a search for Shakespeare + slang or Elizabethan + slang. For starters, you can go to the websites listed below and try to get a feel for how the English language was used in Shakespeare's time.
4.
4
Decide what your new setting is going to be. You may or may not have thought about this yet. If you're moving the story up into a more modern era, you're going to have to decide where in that era it would have happened, and to who and how and why. And in order to do that, you're going to have to figure out what the modern equivalent to the play's situation is. Romeo and Juliet is a very easy and obvious one, so it gets redone a lot this way - and for that reason unless you have a really original idea it isn't recommended that you use Romeo and Juliet.
5.
5
Familiarize yourself with the vernacular and slang of the setting you picked. Or in other words, if you're resetting The Merchant of Venice in Spanish Harlem in the 1970's, you need to go figure out how people in Spanish Harlem talked in the 1970's and what their pop-cultural references would have been. This is where accuracy *is* important; your audience has to be able to recognize some things or the revised play won't make sense to them.
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6
Start with one scene. You don't necessarily have to start with the first one. Pick a scene that, for you, sets the tone for the rest of the play, then sit down and start playing with it. The easiest way to do this is to picture in your head how the scene would look if you were seeing it performed as per your translation, and then start changing things in the play itself to match your vision. Once you have this first scene converted to your liking, then you can move on to the next one. You don't have to work on them in order.
7.
7
Keep your revisions organized. You can of course do this any way you're comfortable with, including by sitting down with a notebook and pencil and a copy of the play, but at first it might be easiest to copy and paste the scene you're starting with into a word processing program, change the font color to anything but black, and then double or triple-space between all the lines. Type in your revised lines, scene directions and etcetera in black in the space under the originals.

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L. S. Vygotsky Research
Online books, journals for academic research, plus bibliography tools.
www.Questia.com/L_S_Vygotsky

edit Tips

* If all you want to do is convert the language but not the play's setting, follow the above instructions but without changing anything but the dialog. You will still have to pick a setting, in your own mind at least, in order to keep your conversion of the language consistent.
* Since Word documents over a certain size can become almost impossible to navigate around in, you might consider making each scene a separate document. It will be easy enough to cut and paste them all back together into one document once you're finished.
* Things to keep in mind about Shakespeare: We think of Shakespeare as being highbrow, a writer for educated people and intellectuals; he was actually writing the equivalent, for his time, of lowbrow sitcoms and pop-culture movies of the week. He was crude and politically incorrect. He was writing for the great unwashed masses, trying to make them pick his theater over the bear-baiting going on down the street. He was also very, very talented and a great storyteller, and that's why his stuff has stayed popular as long as it has. The language may go out of style, but the stories never will.
* Remember, this isn't rocket science! This is Art, and Art is subjective - there is no one 'correct' way your finished product has to look, and you don't have to get it perfect the first time through. Write. Convert. Have fun!

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edit Warnings

* Be prepared for the fact that some of your translations - unless you're deliberately cleaning this thing up for "G" audiences - could turn out to be equivalent to words you only hear in Quentin Tarantino movies.

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