Wash away the Lead: The Poetic Life of Translator Zhu Shenghao

Shakespeare’s plays have inspired countless people, and the artistic value and literary status are self-evident. In modern times, many translators tried to introduce Shakespeare’s plays to China through translation, among which Zhu Shenghao’s translations are the ones with the widest influence and the largest audience. Zhu Shenghao has thus succeeded in introducing advanced foreign cultures into China and making the Chinese people aware of the world’s outstanding literature. Bourdieu’s sociological theories have been continuously applied to translation studies since they were introduced into translation studies by Canadian scholar Simeoni in the 1990s. Taking Bourdieu’s sociological theory as a research perspective, this paper draws on the three core concepts of the theory: field, capital and habitus, and adopts this dynamic and time-honoured perspective to probe into the tug-of-war behind the translators’ translations, and to explore the essence of the reasons behind the success of Zhu Shenghao’s translations.