Retranslating definition
Retranslating normally means ‘translating the same source text again’, and especially doing so in awareness of previous translations (Lawrence Venuti stresses this point in his essay ‘Retranslations: The Creation of Value’, 2004). But for one thing, the ‘same source text’ is rarely, certainly in the case of Shakespeare, ‘the same’. In Figure 2, “ST(e1)” means ‘edition one’, from the point of view of the retranslation corpus: not the ‘first edition’ in English, but the first of those editions which serve translators as sources. Shakespeare’s translators often refer to several English source editions, because editions vary not only in terms of the text they establish, but in terms of glosses, notes, and commentaries, which often direct translators’ choices. For another thing, when retranslations multiply, it is not safe to assume that retranslators are actively aware of all their precursors. In Figure 2, the translator of (target text) TT4 refers to TT2, but not TT1 or TT3. And TT2 is revised, taking into account TT4. And both TT2(e2) and TT4 serve as sources for a retranslation – chain- translation – into a third language (TL = target language); as for example German Shakespeares served many Polish and Russian translations, and French Shakespeares served Spanish and Arabic