Are English language books translated to contemporary English? [closed]

Were Shakespeare books translated to contemporary English? Which version is more common? Is there a rule to choose which books will have its language updated? Are poems updated too? From which year I should expect that books have a "translation"?

Shakespeare is considered Modern English, and is almost never rendered in contemporary English. It is usually edited for spelling and other reasons, however, depending on your edition.

There is no "freshness date" that triggers a translation, though. It depends in large part on which version of English is being cited. Much of Middle English (e.g., Chaucer) is updated to be readable by high-school students, but left intact in scholarly works and upper-level college texts. Old English texts (Beowulf, "The Dream of the Rood", The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle and the like) are almost always translated, except for students of Old English (or Linguistics) who are studying the language.

You are free to update any work you like that is out of copyright.

There is a good source of modern Shakespeare. The trouble is that if you update the language you lose the rhythm of the prose. Since generally the storyline in Shakespeare makes airport novels look good, without the phrasing there isn't a lot of point.

Then there is the issue of context: do you upgrade locations and people (like moneylenders) to modern equivalents? Or do you just use the basic idea and write West Side Story?

A simple google search confirms that there is a large market for translations of Shakespeare into contemporary English.

You may notice that many of those editions are intended for secondary school students.

One may quibble about what translation means or what Modern English is but there it is.

However, I do think it is rare (I couldn't find one on that list, without looking too far) that a 'translation' is published that doesn't have the original on the other page.

There's no rule as to what text is translated or not (no date cutoff, etc), just a small market voice that says "Hey, all the kids are complaining they don't understand what's going on, is there a modern version of this stuff?".

As to translating Shakespeare's poems, probably not (in my abbreviated perusal I didn't see any); if you really want to read his poetry, you probably wouldn't care for the translation. Most of the plays are written in verse themselves, so there's that paradox to resolve; the teachers (and parents) expect the students to be exposed to Shakespeare's plays, the students would rather not and the side-by-side translation is a middle ground, and in the honors English class where the poetry is actually read, well, what's the point of not reading the original.

The King James Version of the Protestant Bible has been 'translated' quite a bit and it was published in the same period (early 1600's).

Between that time and now, I don't think any literature has been popular enough and hard to read enough that the market made a translation viable. A hundred years later, Robinson Crusoe came out and that is very readable.