Glen Nichols
Guest Editor
An open call for papers on a given topic will shape the final publication in unpredictable ways. This special issue of TRIC is no exception. Thanks to Louise Ladouceur’s energetic marshalling of Francophone contributions we have achieved a broad and forward-looking snapshot of current research on theatre translation in Canada. Most exciting is the frequent internationalist framing of questions about translation in and of Canadian theatre. Well beyond the traditional source/target dichotomy, beyond the questions of equivalence and fidelity, the papers here target essential definitions of what translation is or can be in the theatre. Through a variety of original approaches, the papers touch on the role of translation both at the core of theatricality and in the shaping of language itself.
In a world of hypertext and other “techno” mergings, Robert Lepage’s interest in language transformation, mutation, and posttranslation positionality finds a critical home in Jane Koustas’s study. Grounded on contemporary translation and linguistic theory, the article offers powerful tools to look at translation in postmodern performance because Lepage’s work, in particular Zulu Time, operates beyond translation by situating the plays between languages where the “audience frequently experiences several cultures simultaneously and must remain on the interface rather than on either side of the source/target linguistic or cultural divide.” The dichotomous formalism of source/target, translation/adaptation, and author/audience concepts, which circumscribe traditional discussions of translation, are here left far behind.
Paul Malone’s contribution extends the well-known discussion of the Van Burek/Glassco and Findlay/Bowman translations of Les belles-soeurs to include the 1987 German version by Hanspeter Plocher. Malone’s argument, founded on the concept of domestic “remainder,” contends that Les belles-soeurs is more than just joual, and that the “text’s cultural and historical functions” may correspond better than the language issues in the receiving culture and therefore become the adequate sites of translation work. The article also raises the issue of canon texts and the role of translation in developing the canon in a target literary system; moreover, Malone suggests, the German translation reflects in the target system the way a source text may be canonized in its own environment.
Greg Reid and Christine Famula’s original choice of catachresis as their critical fulcrum is particularly fruitful because of its relevance to both the play and translation theory. First, due to a complex relationship between the la sagouine character and her (mis)use of language, the original French-language play reveals itself through the application of catachresis to be a kind of “simulacral translation,” so that translator de Céspedes is confronted with creating, in effect, a translation of a translation. Second, because of its creative impact in language, catachresis is introduced as a powerful catalyst in translation work, where there is frequent need to “express the signified of a source language in a target language which does not have a corresponding signifier.” As a result this article becomes much more than a simple sourcetext/ target-text comparison, but rather develops fluid, destabilizing, and revealing questions of translation theory.
From an internationalist, European point of view, Linda Dewolf looks at surtitling in the theatre, not as an adaptationtranslation dichotomy but as an autonomous product, an echo of the source text. The article reviews the process of creating surtitles, including the physical, technical, and computer constraints. She discusses the impact of simultaneity in translation and source coding: while “watching/reading” the surtitled translation, the audience can “hear” the source performance and thus preserve certain original cultural aspects. This is seen as a kind of intercultural mediation contributing to the valorization and mutual recognition of original ideas through new practices that respect the identities of all.
Chantal Gagnon uses translations of Shakespeare by Antonine Maillet, Michel Garneau, and Normand Chaurette to argue that translation strategies in the Quebec theatre of the 1990s differ from those of an earlier more politicized period. The article looks at the evidence of language (how verse/prose differences are translated using or not using “quebecois”), at paratextual features of the publication of the texts, and at the question of re-translation even within short time spans.
Finally, André Loiselle poses the problem: “Can one speak of ‘translation’ when describing the process of cinematic adaptation of a theatre play to the screen?” He then examines five specific examples of film-drama transpositions to analyze the degree of adaptation/translation in each, which allows his exploration of corresponding definitions and applications in cross-genre situations. The upshot is an original and powerful tool for the study of theatre translation itself. Loiselle grounds his argument on aspects of “dynamic equivalence” and “performative translation,” carefully separating “production”-required changes from those of “reception” alone. By utilizing a vocabulary drawn from film studies, Loiselle builds a complex analysis of transcodage intermédiatique that has important implications for understanding the role of page/stage transformations in light of textual translation for the stage.
Although a call for papers results in a conspicuously diverse collection, it is important for telling us not only where research interests lie currently, but also about directions for future work. This issue has, productively, focussed on Quebec and Acadian dramaturgy as source or target for translation. But future work on the role of translation in contemporary English Canadian theatre, for example, both domestically and internationally, will add to the field. Studies of the contribution of translation to canonical theatre in English Canada, the growing interest in bilingual and multilanguage productions, and examinations of dominant translators such as Linda Gaboriau (to mention only a few potential directions for research) will answer important contextual questions to complement what is already available. Many profound thanks to Louise, to the six contributors, and to the various reader-evaluators for making this issue of TRIC both an important picture of where we are and a map of where we go from here.