The Stage Play in Translation Studies The 1970s: New approaches and new concepts
The Stage Play in Translation Studies The 1970s: New approaches and new concepts
At this time translation studies had not yet established itself as a modern academic discipline, and the topic of translating for the stage was broached by only a few individual literary scholars (e.g. Levy, 1969; Mounin, 1967; Bednarz, 1969) and translators (e.g. Corrigan, 1961; Brenner-Rademacher, 1965; Hamberg, 1966; Hartung, 1965; Sahl, 1965). Once again, the debate centred round the question of the 'actable', 'performable' stage text on the one hand and the faithful scholarly translation on the other. Theatre practi- tioners also objected that translated theatre texts often had to be changed during rehearsals to make them suitable for a stage performance (cf. Snell- Hornby, 1984). Early impulses from the emerging interdisciplinary per- spectives of translation studies, though still within the framework of literary studies, came in the 1970s, in particular from the international colloquium 'Literature and translation' held in Leuven in April 1976. In her contribution, 'Translating spatial poetry: An examination of theatre texts in performance', Susan Bassnett described a play as 'much more than a literary text, it is a combination of language and gesture brought together in
a harmonious frame of timing' (Bassnett-McGuire, 1978: 161), and she pres- ents 'patterns of tempo-rhythm' and 'basic undertextual rhythms' as new key concepts. In the French-speaking scientific community a semiotic approach was adopted: Anne Ubersfeld (1978:153) describes the theatre text as one that merges into a dense pattern of synchronic signs, and Patrice Pavis (1976) equates the staging of a written text, the mis en scene, with a mis en signe.
The 1980s and 1990s: Developing independent theoretical approaches
The early contributions on stage translation unanimously point out that at the time this was an area previously ignored by translation theory, and it
was during the course of the 1980s that the deficit was corrected. The first major step was to describe the specific characteristics of the dramatic text and what makes it so different from other kinds of literary text. One striking feature is that the stage text as such consists of two clearly separate compo- nents: the stage directions on the one hand and the spoken dialogue on the other. It is above all this latter component that is meant when the term 'stage translation' is used. In her text typology of 1971 the German transla-
tion scholar Katharina Reji g had already identified 'audiomedial' (later 'multimedial') texts as those written, not to be read silently, but to be spoken or sung, and that are hence dependent on a non-verbal medium or
A Companion to Translation Studies on other non-verbal forms of expression, both acoustic and visual, to reach
their intended audience. Unlike the case of the novel, short story or lyric poem, in multimedial texts the verbal text is only one part of a larger and complex whole – and this poses particular problems for translation. Exam- ples of multimedial texts in this definition are film scripts, radio plays, opera libretti and drama texts. The latter two share the characteristic that they are written specifically for live performance on the stage, and they have been compared with a musical score which only realises its full poten- tial in the theatrical performance (Snell-Hornby, 1984; Totzeva, 1995).