Semantic Features of the Vietnamese Translation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet

Translation has never been an easy task for translators, who can be remarkably good at languages, and speak rapidly in communication, but find themselves in difficulty even it is intralingual or extralingual translation. To have a good translation, there are both objective and subjective conditions affecting translators. This study, by applying the theories of translation strategies and translation procedures suggested by Peter Newmark, Mona Baker and other scholars, has compared and contrasted the similarities and differences as well as the changes in terms of semantic features between the Shakespeare’s English and the Vietnamese translation of Romeo and Juliet by Dang The Binh. It is found that Omission is the most typical strategy used while other strategies appeared with different frequency, which objectively affects the quality of the Vietnamese translation of Romeo and Juliet.