Roya Ahari - M.A. Islamic Azad University, Tabriz Branch, Tabriz, Iran

The present study sought to survey the translations of postcolonial theory in William Shakespeare s famous play Othello. In this play, the focus was on examining the possible problems of the translations of Othello and this research was based on the theory of Gayatry Spivak. The problem of the postcolonial theory was otherness and racial difference which investigated the sixteenth century Elizabethan view of race and its influence on person’s innate character within the context of Othello, and contained five questions. The purpose of this research was analyzing the postcolonial elements and the translator s ideology on transferring these items into the target text. In achieving this object, a masterpiece of English literature of Othello by William Shakespeare as well as its four relative translations was selected as the corpus of the study. The interest of Elizabethan audience in Moorish matter was remarkable in drama and they considered the African as the domain of war, conquest, fratricide, lust and treachery and often portrayed as violent villains that violated human morality. The researcher extracted the postcolonial elements of the play and applied Spivak s model for the translation strategies within the Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) as the framework of the study. At the end, researcher concluded that Othello was a racial prejudice that translators could not properly render the postcolonial theory into the target text and thus, sometimes they illustrated Othello as a savage and uncivilized black Moor and sometimes as a brave General of his past.

Postcolonial, Postcolonial Theory, Otherness, Descriptive Translation Studies