Translation, transmission, transportation

John Willett

pp. 1-13

in: Ian Donaldson (ed), Transformations in modern European drama, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 1983

Abstract

Most people agree that theatres in the English-speaking world need to import foreign-language plays: the argument is self-evident. But how in fact do they do so? There are from the start a number of different approaches, which tend to lead to rather different results. Case (a): a management wants to do a play which has been a great box-office success on the European continent. Case (b): a subsidised theatre wants to do a play because it has heard interesting reports of it; here commercial motives are secondary. Case (c): the author's London or New York agent gets a translation done in order to interest theatres in it. Case (d): a radio organisation — mostly the BBC — decides to broadcast a play and commissions a translation, which may later find its way into the theatre. Case (e): a publisher commissions a translation which has above all got to be readable. Case (f): somebody — a playwright, an academic, a retired colonel or a clergyman's wife, falls for a foreign play and translates it on spec. off his or her own bat.