Interjections in Shakespeare’s "Hamlet" and their Polish translations

Abstract

The present paper aims at investigating the problem of translating interjections from English into Polish. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and its Polish translations by J. Paszkowski (1961), M. Słomczyński (1978), and S. Barańczak (1990) are chosen as the corpus for the present study. The analysis of the translations of the original English interjections will reveal the translational strategies followed by the trans-lators. The fi rst part of the paper is devoted to a short discussion concerning the defi nition and taxonomy of interjections. Next, the problem of the role interjections play in drama is discussed on the basis of the specialist literature. Finally, different translation strategies are presented followed by the analysis of the corpus material.