Postgraduate study: it is a clever father who knows his children. translate

Even the cleverest father doesn't necessarily know his children. This sentence comes from Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, which is a usage of "code" here, so it cannot be simply translated as "only a wise father knows his children." The translation of this sentence itself is controversial.

To understand this sentence, it is necessary to make a more detailed analysis of the context of this sentence: the "speaker" in the original text is Shakespeare who lived in the European Renaissance, and the "speaker" in this sentence in the script is the son whose biological father doesn't know and wants to make fun of his father. He is the servant of Shylock, a usurer, and plays the role of a clown in the play; The target readers ("recipients") of the source text are English readers who are in the source culture and are familiar with their idioms and allusions. In the play, the father is almost invisible. The topic is that the father is asking someone (his own son) about the way to Shylock's house and his son's situation.

"Code" is early modern English (written at the end of 16) with humorous language "style"/"tone". The author quotes and uses an English proverb: A clever child will know his father through a playwright.

This form (structure) has no syntactic ambiguity in a simple analysis out of language context, but it is an stressed sentence with only theme-rheme structure. However, in the analysis of the cultural context of the original text, because it is a form of English proverbs, it cannot be understood as a general stressed sentence. At the lexical level, the semantic pun of "know" in this sentence can mean both "know" and "understand".

Extended data

In Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice, it is wise to know the father of your child. In the translation of a sentence, it seems that people have not reached a * * * understanding on how to translate this sentence.

Only a wise father knows his son. Liu Yunbo thinks that Mr. Zhu's translation is wrong, and the translation given is: no matter how clever a father is, he may not know his children. Liu Yunbo, Translation of a Special Sentence Pattern in English Proverbs, Chinese translation,No. 1994,No. 1.

Mr. Fang Ping thinks that there is no translation error in Zhu Shenghao. Fang Ping, "There is nothing wrong with Zhu Shenghao's translation", China's translation, No.6, 1994. Mr. Lao Long also thinks that Zhu's translation is correct and ambiguous, but Liang Shiqiu's translation seems to be more appropriate: "Only a wise father knows his son."

Lao Long, On the Translation of the Sentence "He who knows his own children is a wise father", Chinese translation,No. 1995,No. 1. In many comments, Liu Junping's analysis is more comprehensive and therefore more convincing. Liu Wen also thinks that Liang's translation is slightly better than others. Liu Junping, "This is a wise father in translation", Chinese translation, No.4, 1995.

The reason lies in the cognitive context of translators, readers and commentators (or cognitive form refers to the current situation of encyclopedic knowledge related to communication in the brains of communication participants and a series of assumptions formed in the brains for mutual understanding, which are not exactly the same as these assumptions. They change with people, time and place as the communication situation changes, and are only temporarily fixed in a certain period of time).