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Translation of Drama
The text of a play is but one component of what we generally call drama. The non-verbal part plays a crucial role in the eventual appreciation of a play. How is a play to be translated? As a purely literary text or as a comprehensive work that has verbal and non-verbal components? There are people like Anne Ubersfeld who believe that text and performance cannot be delinked and any translation that looks at text alone is a highly inadequate one. Peter Bogatyrev has pointed out how a character's social situation is brought out not just by the text alone but extra-textual factors like “the actor's gestures, finished off by his costumes, the scenery, etc” (qtd in Bassnett 122). The dramatic text also has undertones that reveal the nature of relationships or the mental state of a character. It is these nuances that tend to slip through the gaps of translation. The good theatre translator cannot afford to ignore these paralinguistic aspects of dramatic performance. It can also not be denied that certain texts like Shakespeare have been translated as written texts without much attention to the performance aspect. The plays of Bernard Shaw with their long speeches also tempt the translator to focus only on the written part. What is significant about these plays is that they are largely taught as academic texts without their performance component. In terms of translatability, the difficulty level posed by dramatic texts would come second to poetry. |
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