“To Go ‘Into’ My Dialect”: Jane Lai’s Cantonese Translation of King Lear and the Historical Context of its Performances in Hong Kong

Abstract

The English performance of Shakespeare in Hong Kong during the early colonial governance period served partly to support the cultural security of the British expatriates, and partly the edification of the locals. However, the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an increase in Cantonese translations and adaptations of Shakespeare, which marked a new way of leveraging Shakespeare to resonate with the local culture and its sentiments. Within this wave of Cantonese productions, the translations by Jane Lai, a translator, professor, and native of Hong Kong, have garnered widespread acclaim within both theatrical and translation spheres. This article will focus on Lai’s Cantonese translation of King Lear, produced in the 1980s for stage performance, and conduct a comparative textual analysis of the Cantonese translation with its English source text and the corresponding Mandarin translations, with an aim to explore the translation strategies employed by Lai to ensure the Cantonese King Lear’s acceptability to the local culture on the page and stage. Moreover, the article will delve into the historical context of the play’s performance to unravel the elements that contributed to the success of the Cantonese King Lear on the stage during that specific period.