Building TRACE (translations censored) theatre corpus: some methodological questions on text selection

Editores:Micaela Muñoz-Calvo; Carmen Buesa-Gómez[EN] Many of the theatre translations that were published, performed or shown in the Franco period are still part and parcel of Spanish culture now, with very few updates. Theatre translation catalogues compiled under the TRACE (Translations Censored) project hold abundant contextual censorship (CE) information on plays by foreign authors who were usually granted a more lenient treatment by Spanish censors than native authors or plays. Of all potentially pernicious topics carefully filtered by Francoist censorship boards, the most outstanding was homosexuality. The Spanish production of Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band was not the first nor was it the last play to show homosexuals on Spanish stages, but its premiere in 1975 was probably the drama production that showed for the first time homosexuality in a more carefree way with the biggest impact on theatregoers and critics alike The descriptive-explanatory study of any corpus of censored translations, such as The Boys in the Band, pose key methodological issues: how many texts to include or how much text (number of percentage of words) to select for the descriptive-comparative stage or how to select text fragments. Information retrieved from censorship records (translations and records) is used to address such issues within a Descriptive Translation Studies methodological framework

Rewriting for the Spanish Stage

[EN] In the course of my research on translations of English drama into Spanish, I have dealt with a variety of target texts considered, and many times labelled, "translations" or "versions". In most cases the translator presents a play originally written in English to the Spanish audiences in their own language. There are sorne translators who are allegedly faithful to the original, some others who claim they have "adapted" the play to a stage or audience, and there is a small group of so called translators who rewrite the original and make the play their own. The purpose of this paper is to discuss those instances of rewriting in the light of the results of a large scale research work, just completed this year, in which I have studied 150 translations Of English drama into Spanish. A case in point is Alfonso Sastre 's version of Langston Hughes' play Mulatto. This "version" poses questions related to the very notion of equivalence in translation and brings to the fore the questions of rewriting, or as Milan Kundera puts it, the "demon of rewriting" which affects literature and, more specifically, theatre. I shall discuss this notion of rewriting in relation to the concept of adaptation and translation, always in the context of foreign theatre texts presented in a different culture and language. The way this process of rewriting is undertaken and the "methods" used by certain playwrights when rewriting a play will also be discussed. The status of the original text and other translated texts will also contribute to clarify the way rewriting takes places and the extent to which this way of importing plays may affect the reception of certain playwrights in the Spanish theatrical system

A framework for the description of drama translations

[EN] The purpose of this paper is to to propose a framework for the description of translated playtexts. The object of study is (interlingual) translations (from the 1950s to the 1980s, English into Spanish) rather than the (intralingual) translation or transposition of plays from page to stage. In attempting to study and describe translated theatre, one is faced with key issues, such as whether the description of plays is in anyway different from that of novels or poems, and where lie the limits of its specificity. The twofold nature of drama, written-to-be-performed, is a fundamental question in any approach to this field of study and most of the ways in which it differs from other literary products stem from this dual nature. The framework we suggest (an adapted version of the four-state scheme by Lambert and Van Gorp, 1985) starts with the registration and analysis of preliminary information about each translated playtext recorded, followed by the (macro and micro) textual analysis of Source Text-Target Text pairs, which are further examined in the fourth intersystemic stage. In all levels the dual nature of theatre is contemplated, specifically in the textual analysis with the use of the replica or utterance, the minimal structural unit of drama texts. To exemplify how the four-stage scheme is used, three case studies are considered: the 1971 translation of Our Town/Nuestra Ciudad by Thornton Wilder, Arnold Wesker’s 1973 The Kitchen/La cocina and 1980 Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge/Panorama desde el puente

Arthur Miller's A View From the Bridge in Spanish

The comparative study of two published Spanish translations of Arthur Miller's A view from the bridge challenges the concepts of page-oriented or stage-oriented translation but also the concepts of drama translation and adaptation. The translation by José Luis Alonso, published in 1980, is assumedly a stage version deriving form Miller's revised two-act version, while the Spanish translation published by Muchnik in 1956 in Argentina most likely derives from the 1955 one-act original. A close comparison of both translations of Panorama desde el puente shows that the 1980 Spanish text seems to derive from the 1956 Argentinian text thus adapted for the Spanish stage

The censorship of theatre translations under Franco: the 1960s

También publicado como monografía en: https://www.routledge.com/Ideology-Censorship-and-Translation/McLaughlin-Munoz-Basols/p/book/9780367609894[EN] Over the last decade, Spain's censorship records have been used by translation studies scholars as the main source to reconstruct the history of translated culture. Censorship archives are virtually the only source of information to research the history of theatre translations in Spain, since they provide access to materials that range from contextual information to actual manuscripts (from draft versions to final censored texts). This contribution will provide a glimpse into the history of theatre translations in the 1960s, a period of political openness from within the Ministry in charge of theatre censorship and of intense activity on Spanish stages. Using textual and contextual evidence gathered from Spanish censorship archives, the actual process that led to the 1966 stage production of Albee's Who's afraid of Virginia Woolf? will help illustrate how play scripts were evaluated when submitted to the censors’ ideologically-biased scrutiny and to what extent ideological manipulation was forced into the production script. Such evidence shows that foreign plays were integrated in to Spanish theatre through translation and adaptation. It also reveals the role of censors, stage directors and professional translators in the censorship process that can be traced from the actual records.This work was supported by the University of the Basque Country, UPV/EHU, the Consolidated Research Group TRALIMA [grant number GIC12/197], the Basque Government [grant number IT728/13]; and the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, MINECO [grant number FFI2012-39012-C04-01T]

Técnicas psicodramáticas en el trabajo grupal con mujeres en talleres de desarrollo personal y sexualidad

Los talleres de desarrollo personal y de sexualidad son plataformas de prevención primaria y secundaria con un muy fácil acceso a la población, convirtiéndose en una de las intervenciones sociales más rápidas, baratas y cercanas a las necesidades del grupo. En el presente artículo se describen y analizan las distintas técnicas psicodramáticas que se han utilizado en talleres grupales de desarrollo personal y de sexualidad con mujeres; muy adecuadas por su dinamización grupal e implicación emocional, se complementan con técnicas de risoterapia, autoconocimiento, afrontamiento, etc. El principal objetivo ha sido el empoderamiento de las mujeres de una comunidad, desde una perspectiva de género. El último apartado recoge algunos aspectos técnicos de una posible intervención desde el psicodrama en grupos con fibromialgia, como sugerencia para trabajos futuros.Personal development and Sexuality workshops are platforms of primary and secondary prevention with an extremely easy access for the population, thus becoming a social intervention that is considered one of the fastest, cheapest and closest to the group needs. In this paper it will be discussed and analyzed the various psycodramatic techniques used in personal development and sexuality group workshops. As these techniques are very appropriate due to their group-invigorating aspect and emotional involvement, they are complementary to laugh therapy, self-knowledge, confrontation, etc. The main aim has been women empowerment within a community from a gender perspective. The last section deals with some technical aspects of a possible psychodramatic intervention in groups suffering from fibromyalgia, as a suggestion for future work