Translation and theatre

Abstract

The last two decades have seen an increasing interest from different quarters in exploring the territory that exists between translation and theatre. Examining discussions of the nature of drama and theatre — that see them as performative rather than representative entities (Worthen 2003; Schechner 2002) — this article argues for a rethinking of the interdisciplinary relations between translation and theatre in the context of wider debates over the value of interdisciplinarity in translation studies (Pym 1998; Chesterman 2010; Bassnett 2012). Drawing on the contributions to this special issue, the social dimension of translation and the performative nature of culture are brought to the fore as productive new ways of studying translation in the theatre as a performative and social as well as a linguistic practice.

Translation and didactics in the language classroom: the preparation and dissemination of a dual-language critical edition of José Luis Alonso de Santos’Bajarse al moro/Going down to Morocco

“…Scholarship in the field of theatre translation has been greatly enriched in recent years by its movement away from purely text-based study to embrace the translation process involved in and invoked by performance (Bassnett 2002, 123-135;Marinetti 2013); this does not, however, imply that the study of dialogue in performance somehow becomes obsolete, but it is nevertheless undoubtedly the case that the rise of scholarly interest in, say, theatre surtitles (Carlson 2010, 180-213;Ladouceur 2013) or museum spaces (Jiang 2010) has coincided with a reduction in the attention paid to multilingual texts on the printed page. There is thus a need for studies which might, for example, focus on methods for evaluating the quality of facing-page translations.…”