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]

Profesión: adaptador

Uno de los grandes problemas con el que se enfrenta el crítico de traducciones de teatro es la variedad de etiquetas que se emplean para identificar el producto vertido de una lengua a otra y la aún mayor diversidad de realidades que se esconden tras dichas etiquetas. Para tratar de estudiar este fenómeno, hemos optado por un acercamiento, más que prescriptivo, fundamentalmente descriptivo, de lo que en realidad se esconde tras la denominación. Parece existir un cierto consenso entre los estudiosos del tema en cuanto a lo que se entiende como adaptación, versión o traducció

From Catalogue to Corpus in DTS: Translations Censored under Franco. The Trace Project

Selecting representative textual corpus for descriptive comparative work in DTS has always been considered a key matter. When dealing with translations censored (TRACE) in Fran- co’s Spain, the analysis of the information contained in the (narrative, theatre, cinema) catalogues of censored translations has lead to the establishment of explicit criteria for se- lecting representative texts. This makes the textual corpora selected for closer comparative study prototypical rather than anecdotal or randomly chosen. A crucial question, justifying the selection of certain texts as the object of descriptive comparative work in DTS, is thus tackled in a progressive and explicit manner by proceeding from catalogue to corpus.Una de las cuestiones clave con la que nos hemos encontrado en la investigación sobre TRAducciones CEnsuradas en la época de Franco (proyecto TRACE) es la selección de corpus textuales representativos derivados del análisis de la información tabulada en los diferentes catálogos de traducciones censuradas (narrativa, teatro, cine). La compilación de inventarios y su procesamiento en bases de datos informáticas manejables, facilita enorme- mente la selección de textos objeto de estudio descriptivo-comparativo. Del análisis de la información contenida en los catálogos surgen criterios de selección textual razonados, una cuestión crucial que, hasta la fecha, había planteado serios problemas a la hora de justificar el estudio de un texto como tal texto individual o como prototípico

La réplica como unidad de descripción y comparación de textos dramáticos traducidos

[ES] Al estudiar y manejar textos dramáticos, originales o traducidos, surgen problemas que tienen mucho más que ver con la estructura específica de la obra dramática que con el análisis mismo que se intenta llevar a cabo. Tal es el caso del estudio descriptivo- comparativo de las traducciones de obras de teatro. Resulta relativamente sencillo apoyarse en las unidades dramáticas tradicionales, el acto y la escena, y lo es también recurrir a unidades relacionadas, con el desarrollo de la acción, episodios o situaciones. También parece adecuado recurrir a unidades sintácticas como la oración o el sintagma. Sin embargo, y por sorprendente que parezca, no se encuentra en los estudios sobre teatro —traducido u original— ninguna referencia a una unidad, estructural y de sentido, íntimamente unida al género dramático y consustancial a él. La doble articulación del texto dramático, su naturaleza dual en cuanto espectáculo y literatura, han sido la causa las más de las veces de que no se haya querido ir demasiado lejos al realizar análisis textuales de obras de teatro. Si se estudia la pieza teatral del mismo modo que si de una novela o un poema se tratara, se corre el riesgo de considerar el género sólo como literatura. Si, en cambio, se estudia la obra como fenómeno escénico, se cae en la contradicción de utilizar el texto escrito —supuestamente relegado a un segundo plano— como fuente, medio y fin. Dos caras de la misma moneda, página y escenario, inseparables y en ocasiones aparentemente incompatibles conforman un todo complejo que se suele estudiar en relación con otros productos y utilizando los hallazgos de otras disciplinas. El teatro, como literatura, se considera un género más cuyos textos, dejando aparte la estructuración en escenas o actos, parecen no alejarse en exceso de la narrativa o la lírica. Los estudios centrados en el teatro como espectáculo, la puesta en escena estudiada desde el ángulo de la Semiología o la Semiótica, a veces se encauzan por derroteros tan difusos que el texto del que se parte se pierde en una maraña de consideraciones sobre códigos no-lingüísticos que en el texto teatral, sin embargo, están solamente codificados lingüísticamente. Esta aportación no trata de ignorar las divisiones textuales y sintácticas tradicionalmente utilizadas, sino de canalizarlas a través de una unidad estructural, menor que el acto y la escena, que es consustancialmente dramática y que refleja la dualidad página/escenario representada por medio del diálogo y marco en el texto escrito y claramente realizada en la puesta en escena. Dicha unidad es operativa no sólo al nivel de la comparación macroestructural, sino en el proceso de comparación textual microestructural. La unidad que se ha denominado “réplica” en esta aportación, cumple las premisas apuntadas anteriormente. En la página escrita, la réplica se representa de forma gráfica del siguiente modo: al nombre del personaje le sigue el discurso correspondiente, acompañado generalmente por acotaciones de diversa índole referidas a este discurso. En la puesta en escena, la réplica adquiere forma oral cuando el actor declama el discurso asignado a su personaje, y el texto secundario que acompaña a dicho discurso se traduce en el escenario en forma de códigos no verbales. La réplica, compuesta de marco y diálogo, es, por tanto, la unidad dramática por excelencia, en la página y el escenario