Theatre Translation as Collaboration: A Case in Point in British Contemporary Drama

Theatre translation is usually seen as a more elaborate dimension of literary translation because the text being translated is considered to be just one of the elements of theatre discourse. When translating a play, the translator should always adapt for performance the text he or she is recreating and be aware that a performer will deliver the lines. The translator, then, must take into account both the pragmatic and the semantic expressiveness of the word and remember that they are always at work simultaneously. I will take examples both from my personal experience and from remarkable cases in point of how a good translation may affect an audience reception of a foreign play and I will show that it is primarily through a pragmatic approach that it is possible to obtain an awareness of what is the most appropriate way of rendering the original text.