|
|
Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
Alet Kruger
It is true that today the verbal is no longer the central means of
representing and communicating meaning in the dramatic text. In fact, the
verbal and visual modes work together to communicate multiple and complex
messages simultaneously. Consequently, the dramatic text has a dual role in
both the literary and the theatrical systems of a particular culture. This
duality has also influenced the translation of drama. Traditionally, two
principal approaches have been detected in translated drama. In reality,
these are never clear-cut but they are useful to the researcher who wishes
to obtain a better insight into the nature of translated drama and the way
it functions in target literatures and cultures. If the drama is intended to
appear in print only, the translator is likely to approach the translation
as a literary text and will then produce a page translation. In
contrast, if the main aim is staging the drama, the translator will create
a stage translation that will appeal to contemporary
theatre-goers. Both page and stage
translations of dramatic texts are written for spoken delivery. In other
words, the dialogue in such texts is usually designed to simulate real-life,
face-to-face communication. This is also the case in Shakespearean plays and
their translations. When a recent stage translation of The Merchant of
Venice in Afrikaans is compared to an older page translation it is clear
that the stage translator has deliberately employed certain linguistic
features to simulate participation or ‘involvement’ between characters and
make them sound more like real people in authentic situations. It is
therefore no surprise that the stage translation exhibits more contractions
than the page translation – this is a primary method in any language to
indicate spoken speech. What is surprising is the greater use of first and
second person pronouns, emphatics, so-called private verbs, and the
insertion of a far wider range of discourse markers in the stage
translation, even though the stage translation is much shorter than the page
translation. In this presentation I intend to demonstrate how the translator
has actively attempted to influence the visual (i.e. the facial expressions,
gestures, body posture, etc. of the actors) by means of the verbal (in
particular, by means of feedback words, interjections, exclamations,
vocatives, and the Afrikaans courtesy adjunct asseblief = ‘please’)
in the dialogue of the stage translation. This research again emphasises the
delicate interplay between the verbal and the visual in drama
translation.
Panel 7: The Verbal, the Visual, the Translator
The Influence of the Verbal on the Visual in a Stage Translation of The
Merchant of Venice in Afrikaans
Dept of Linguistics (Translation Studies), University of South Africa
© IATIS 2003