I attended yesterday a very interesting workshop about translation applied to plays, you know, that category of literature meant to be performed on a stage in front of the public. Rather weird, isn’t it, especially if you think of literature as a way you hide in your room, lay in your bed and do nothing else for a whole day except reading? Well, in case of the theater plays, literature means everything else except that. It’s worth saying here that theatre was one of the most ancient forms of entertainment and the way to achieve the “catharsis”.
I’m telling you all this because that shift in the way a written piece is meant to reach its public implies added problems in what translation is concerned. Maybe you haven’t thought about it before, I know I didn’t, but think about it now: you might not have the need to say everything, behaviors, and attitudes might be inferred directly by the public; on the other hand, you might have to do an extra work as an author to make the communication between characters, the way they speak with the others or with themselves, seem natural, spontaneous, vivid. And this is a challenge for the translator, too. His job is to recreate the situations and the characters in such a way that it looks familiar to the public in the target language of the play; he should decode the essence of each character and the way each of them is consistent throughout the play and convey similar situations and people in his translation. Not an easy job, right? And it goes without saying: many translation issues caused by the cultural distance between the language, by the temporal distance between the fictional time and the place and time when the play will be represented, and by the many untranslatable puns that make the language more lively.
I really enjoyed going to this workshop and trying to translate the untranslatable, to imagine how the translation will sound on a stage and how a line should be said by an actor in order to get its meaning through to the public. A great experience for language lovers but not limited to them!
Bits and pieces 