culture, subculture and counterculture - Facultatea de Litere

TRANSLATING DRAMA: THE MAIN ISSUES
The “gestic text” that is encoded into the written text is outstandingly
challenging for the translator. Bassnett advises against the acceptance of this
concept which will lead to imposing upon the translator “to do the impossible,
that is, to treat a written text that is part of a larger complex of sign systems,
including paralinguistic and kinesic signs, as if it were a literary text created for
the page and read as such [...] (and) to translate a text that a priori in the source
language is incomplete, containing a concealed gestic text, into the target
language which should also contain a concealed gestic text.” (1991: 99)
The Choice of the Translation Strategy
Before the 1970s, the main focus in translation studies was on achieving
equivalence and this also applied to theatre translation. Since then, the
approaches have multiplied and one can identify two main trends.
One of them is a predominantly linguistically-oriented trend. Theorists
have continued to view literary translation as a process of textual transfer which
is SL text oriented. The result of the translation effort should always be
compared with the original. Translation scholars that support this approach use
the results of descriptive linguistics with the aim of identifying and
systematizing al the syntactic, stylistic and pragmatic properties of the SL texts
hat have to be duplicated in the TL text.
Susan Bassnett, for instance, considers that the drama translator should be
responsive to elements of prosody level by indicates that “the dialogue will be
characterised by rhythm, intonation patterns, pitch and loudness, all elements
that may not be immediately apparent from a straightforward reading of the
written text in isolation” (Bassnett 1991: 122).
The other tendency is to consider the TL text as a product in its own right.
The center of attention is no longer the textual transfer pure and simple, but
cultural mediation and interchange.
Thus, S. Aaltonen declares in “Rewriting the Exotic. The Manipulation of
Otherness in Translated Drama” (in Che Suh 2002: 27) that “in translation,
foreign drama is transplanted into a new environment, and the receiving
theatrical system sets the terms on which this is done. A play script must
communicate and be intelligible at some level, even if it should deviate from
existing norms and conventions.”
Louise Ladouceur, in her study whose objective was to develop a
descriptive analysis model for the translation of drama, states that: “[c]ette étude
descriptive de la traduction n’a donc plus pour objet de déterminer une façon
idéale de traduire, mais de voir plutôt comment on traduit, à quelles modalités
translatives est soumis le texte afin de pouvoir fonctionner dans la langue et la
literature d’accueil comme équivalence d’un texte d’une autre langue,
appartenant à uneautre littérature. De ce point de vue, toute analyse de la
traduction doit nécessairementse rapporter à la fonction assignée à l’oeuvre
traduite dans son contexte adoptif.” (1995: 31)
We could describe this approach as the target text/target culture and
189